Status Updates From البيان الشيوعي

"Why should the bourgeoisie squawk about losing their private property, when they themselves have stolen all their property from the hard-working, upstanding proletarians and farmers who produced it? Why should the bourgeoisie cry out that the Communists want to abolish freedom and individuality, when the bourgeoisie have themselves enslaved the huge majority of the population in the factories?"

"In its pride of triumph the bourgeoisie became insolent, and in its insolence it forgot that in the depths from which it had risen so far, it was itself producing its fatal enemy, the proletariat. "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.""

"If the people were occupied by foreign powers, a nationalist was concerned with the past glories of his people, and with political campaigns to expel the foreigners and unify the country."

Israel and the US anyone?

"The highly Romantic sense of social wrong, and the consequent highly Romantic drive toward social justice, which Marx and Engels shared to a high degree, are the ethical and emotional bases of any socialist movement."

"The hundreds of millions of people who have called themselves Socialists and/or Communists have all believed that the system of private property they knew- whether it was in industrial capital, piles of money, landed estates, serfs, or slaves- was wrong, and that the consequent inequality between the rich and the poor was wrong, and that any exploitation of one human being by another was wrong."

"He became sure that Europe was trembling on the edge of reaction and revolution, that existing societies were dark, cruel, tense, and unstable, and that most of mankind was ground down, unhappy, of divided mind, disaffected from society, and cut off from its own true nature."

True So Far

chapter 1 finished