Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Reading Notes

From "The State and the Socialist Revolution" by J.Martov,
"In reality, the state is nothing more than a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy whose worse sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, will have at the earliest possible moment to lop off, until such time as a new generation, reared under new and free social conditions, will be able to throw on the scrap heap, all the useless lumber of the state." (Engels in his introduction to 'the
Civil War in France").
"From the ground provided by such economic illusions, we see rise again the fallacy that the liberty of the working class can be accomplished by the destruction of the State and not by the conquest of the State. This belief throws back the revolutionary working class movement toward the confusion, indefiniteness and low ideological level that characterized it at the time of the Commune of 1871."
" In her polemic against Edouard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg declared, quite correctly, that 'there never was any doubt for Marx and Engels about the necessity of having the proletariat conquer political power."

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