Quotes About State

I]t was not just capitalism that created fantasies through these Ideological State Apparatus and enforced them through Repressive State Apparatuses--so did communism.

In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.

So vast was the struggle to found the Roman state.

Banking was still in such a rudimentary state that even bankers seemed to be baffled by it.

When the collective unconscious -- via instruments of power such as the media and the entertainment industry -- overestimates motherhood, it is neither out of love for the feminine nor general kindness. The all-virtuous mother prepares the collective body for fascist regression. Power bestowed by a sick state is suspect by nature.

it is most useful to think about these questions not in terms of the individual rights of transsexuals, but in terms of how these issues link with those of other marginalized populations, or with the functioning of the state in general.

No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recogizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one section of the population against another.

The suppression of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.

Complete self-government for the province [gubernia and region], district and community through bureaucrats elected by universal suffrage; the abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.

When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state.

While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.

We do not at all disagree with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as an aim.

But the subordination must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited, of all the toilers, i.e., to the proletariat. Measures must be taken at once, overnight, to substitute for the specific methods of "official administration" by state officials the simple functions of "workmen and managers," functions which are already fully within the capacity of the average city dweller and can well be performed for "workmen's wages.

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.

It is important for us to draw literally all working people into the government of the state. It is a task of tremendous difficulty. But socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the Party. It can be implemented by tens of millions when they have learned to do it for themselves.

We must also note that Engels is most definite in calling universal suffrage an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage, he says, obviously summing up the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is "the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state."

when there is no materialist criticism of political institutions, and when the class character of the modern state is not understood, it is only one step from political radicalism to political opportunism.

The struggle to free the working people from the influence of the bourgeoisie in general, and of the imperialist bourgeoisie in particular, is impossible without a struggle against opportunist prejudices concerning the "state".

The question of the relation of the socialist proletarian revolution to the state, therefore, is acquiring not only practical political importance, but also the significance of a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny.

According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen or maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes.

According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of "order", which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.

Engels elucidates the concept of the "power" which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.

A state arises, a special power is created, special bodies of armed men, and every revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, shows us the naked class struggle, clearly shows us how the ruling class strives to restore the special bodies of armed men which serve it, and how the oppressed class strives to create a new organization of this kind, capable of serving the exploited instead of the exploiters.

The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, "the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both....