QUOTATIONS

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Karl Marx

3. THE SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST STAGE OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Marx and Engels discuss why capitalism leads to socialism and how socialism resolves the contradictions of capitalism. They also distinguish between utopian and scientific socialism and discuss the distinction between the first socialist transitional phase and the communist phase itself.

  "...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy."

  "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

  "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so-called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and , as such sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class."

  "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonism, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

  "What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth mark of the old society from whose womb it emerges …In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour. But one man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labour in the same time... It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and this productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right...

  "But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby."

  "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prize want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

  "Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875

  "To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions, corresponded crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible,, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.

  "To all these, socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the worldly virtue of its own power."

  "From that time forward socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonisms had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict."

  "These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations."

  "Proletarian Revolution - Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the state dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over nature, his own master - free.

Engels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (Intro. written 1892; originally a chapter from Anti-Duhring 1875)

  "The key question of every revolution is undoubtedly the question of state power. Which class holds power decides everything. "A courageous and resolute government steering a firm course is nothing but the dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants."

Lenin, One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution, Sept.27, 1917

  "All nations will arrive at socialism - this is inevitable, but all will do so in not exactly the same way. Each will contribute something of its own to some form of democracy, to some variety of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the varying rate of socialist transformation in the different aspects of social life."

Lenin, A Caricature of Marxism & Imperialist Economism Aug.-Oct. 1916

  "The granting of concessions under reasonable terms is also desirable for us during the period of the coexistence side by side of socialist and capitalist states..."

Lenin, Letter to American Workers, Sept. 23, 1919

  "Indeed, since political power is in the hands of the working class, since this political power owns all the means of production, the only task, indeed, that remains for us is to organize the population in co-operative societies."

  "...we must find what form of 'bonus' to give for joining the co- operatives (and the terms on which we should give it), the form of bonus by which we shall assist the co-operatives sufficiently, the form of bonus that will produce the civilized co-operator. And given social ownership of the means of production, given the class system of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, the system of civilized co-operators is the system of socialism."

Lenin, On Cooperation, Jan.4, 1923

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       Source: Classic Selections by CPUSA Education Department, Nov , 2002