(Quote of the Week)
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The Promise of a Socialist Society
(Quote of the Week)
In the selection below, Friedrich
Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated
future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit
of all mankind.
Their political and intellectual
bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their
economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society
is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products,
which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd
contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are
wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that
the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them.
Their deliverance from these bonds
is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of
the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of
production itself....
With the seizing of the means of
production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and,
simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social
production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for
individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto
confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the
result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have
hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself.
Only from that
time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from
that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and
in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s
leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
To accomplish this act of universal
emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly
comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to
impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the
meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task
of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific
socialism.
—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring
(1878)
As
Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We
do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human
race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of
man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for
instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man.
Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken
on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are
convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with
these.”
Emblazon on our red
banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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