You say you want a revolution?
“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
Vladimir Lenin, What is to be done? (1902)
Here is a collection of texts (and a by no means complete one) that I think fundamental to the understanding of Marxism; an understanding of which I think a fundamental necessity in intervening into the concrete actuality of the Class struggle toward bringing about the universal emancipation of all human kind from the exploitation degradation and humiliation of the Capitalist mode of production, that is, in bringing about the International Socialist Revolution. Listed in chronological order:
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848)
Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx (1865)
Capital: Vol. 1 by Karl Marx (1867)
Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Marx (1875)
Anti-Duhring by Frederick Engels (1877)
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Frederick Engels (1880)
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy by Frederick Engels (1886)
On Historical Materialism by Franz Mehring (1893)
What is to be done? by Vladimir Lenin (1902)
The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin(1918)
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin (1918)
Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin (1920)
The Permanent Revolution by Leon Trotsky (1931)
The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky (1936)
Stalinism and Bolshevism by Leon Trotsky (1937)
Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky (1938)
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser (1970)
“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. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. 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 the 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.”
Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring (1878)
(via rethinksocialism)
