Karl Marx

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Workers of the world unite!"

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"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.“

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"Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.“

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"The theory of the Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.“

"From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his needs.“

"Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.“

"Democracy is the road to socialism.“

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"

Che Guevara

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"The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.“

"There is no other definition of communism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man."

Vladimir Lenin

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"The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic."

Gilles Dauvé

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"Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power. It is a movement which already exists, not as a mode of production (there can be no communist island within capitalist society), but as a tendency which originates in real needs. Communism does not even know what value is. The point is not that one fine day a large number of people start to destroy value and profit. All past revolutionary movements were able to bring society to a standstill, and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communization, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money, open the gate isolating a factory from its neighbourhood, close down another factory where the work process is too alienating to be technically improved, do away with school as a specialized place which cuts off learning from doing for 15 odd years, pull down walls that force people to imprison themselves in 3-room family units - in short, it will tend to break all separations. Communism believes in equality through force.“

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"Communism is the end of the economy as a separate and privileged field on which everything else depends while despising and fearing it. It is used to refer to the economic power under Communist parties that have the dictatorship of the social classes."

Nikita Khrushchev

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"I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever the nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a communist."

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed

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"The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture."