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It was always our view that in order to attain this [proletarian revolution] and the other far more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first take possession of the organised political power of the state and by its aid crush the resistance of the capitalist class and organise society anew.
Friedrich Engels
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Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.
Friedrich Engels
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The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
Friedrich Engels
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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—this 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.
Friedrich Engels
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Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them…'If you don't like to be frizzled in my frying-pan, you can take a walk into the fire'.
Friedrich Engels
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The bourgeoisie... lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority. Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests!
Friedrich Engels
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It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.
Friedrich Engels
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People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.
Friedrich Engels
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By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium — by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilization as against barbarism, of progress as against stability. Even if the agreements were in Denmark's favor — which is very doubtful-this right carries more weight than all the agreements, for it is the right of historical evolution.
Friedrich Engels
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How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected?
The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.
Friedrich Engels
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Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.
Friedrich Engels
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By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
Friedrich Engels
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Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.
Friedrich Engels
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The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.
Friedrich Engels
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Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.
Friedrich Engels
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Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Friedrich Engels
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Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world … the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.
Friedrich Engels
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Friedrich Engels
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Born:
November 28, 1820
Died:
August 5, 1895
(aged 74)
Bio:
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, social scientist, journalist and businessman. He founded Marxist theory together with Karl Marx.
Known for:
The Communist Manifesto (1848)
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1883)
Anti-Dühring (1878)
Most used words:
state
class
bourgeoisie
political
proletarian
production
society
nature
free
proletariat
power
existence
property
law
social
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