Quotes About Engels

Rangan came to the surface in the mid-afternoon of Inauguration Day, in the trunk of a car driven by a terrified aide of Senator Barbara Engels, Chairwoman of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Homeland Security.

En resumen, lo que en 1848 tal vez impresionara a un lector sin compromisos como retórica revolucionaria -o, a lo sumo, como una predicción creíble- puede hoy leerse como una concisa caracterización del capitalismo de fines del siglo XX.

Marx and Engels never talked about murdering the bourgeois. According to the old bourgeois concept, the judges were the ones who judged, and the executioners were the ones who executed.

Before seeking refuge in London, Marx and Engels had taken part in a secret society called the "Communism League" which commissioned them to prepare the now famous (Rest assured that we didn't earn a penny from it…) COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

The socialist doctrines that appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, Marxism included, were gospels of radical change addressed to the alleviation of this misery. Friedrich Engels himself was one of the first to point out the resemblance between this historical situation and that in which Christianity arose.

The soul of the classical Marxism of Marx and Engels was the teaching that the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship was the necessary political instrument of a society's transition to socialism and future communism. To be a genuine Marxist it was not enough to accept the theory of the class struggle; one also had to accept the doctrine of proletarian dictatorship as the goal and terminal point of this struggle.

Marx and Engels are arguably history's most famous couple. Such was the closeness of their collaboration that it is not always easy to recall which works bore both names, which just that of Marx, and which just Engels.

The political utopia envisioned by Marx and Engels clearly implied a total separation between commodity and sentiment, interest and love, as a precondition for authentic, fully human relationships.

Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels's textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something

Friedrich Engels' first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family bonds as part of the Marxian political agenda,100 though Marx himself was politically astute enough to leave that out of the final version.

At age thirty, Engels accepted his father's offer to work in the family business in Manchester. This became the source of Engels' livelihood —and much of Marx's. The young Engels called it forced labor — a painfully ironic term in view of what the phrase was to come to mean in twentieth-century Communist societies. Engels complained, for example, that I've now got to be at the office no later than 10 in the morning.

Marx era una persona odiosa. Vividor desaliñado y polemista virtulento le gustaba alardear que su espora era, por nacimiento, «la baronesa de Von Estphalen»(...). En consecuencia, durante casi toda su vida hubo de depender de los donativos de Engels, para quien el socialismo era una mera afición (...)

It's all about class struggle, isn't it? Serfs against landlords throughout history. Marx and Engels are right. If there was only one class, where everyone worked for the good of all, it would be a better world.

What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say "I am not a Marxist"?

Engels's view of evolution was Lamarckian, rather than strictly Darwinian, in that he believed that characteristics acquired by individuals could be inherited by later generations.

Engels suggested that "real human freedom" can be achieved only in a society that exists "in harmony with the laws of nature.

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."

Marx and Engels thought all of these things could be traced to one root -- private property. If they used a final revolutionary class uprising to overthrow private property, it would mean that class struggle would become unnecessary because there would be nothing to fight over!

a stateless society (a civilization without a government) which Marx and Engels vigorously advocated would be an unorganized mob. It would be no society at all.

In concluding this discussion of the basic fallacies in Communism we should perhaps make a summary comment on the most significant fallacy of them all. This is the Communist doctrine that problems can be solved by eliminating the institution from which the problems emanate. Even Marx and Engels may have been unaware that this was what they were doing, but the student will note how completely this approach dominates every problem they undertook to solve.

Engels could not prevent himself from occasionally unveiling the truth of what was in his mind: "We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma what-ever...."16 In other words, Communism undertakes to replace Judaic-Christian morals with a complete absence of morals.

Marx and Engels visualized a day when there would be unity among men instead of opposition, peace instead of war. Such a hope, of course, violated their own theory of dialectics which says nothing in nature can be at rest—everything is a unity of opposing forces.

Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person.

The Marxist dialectic is essentially word-fetishism. Every article of the faith is embodied in a word fetish whose double or even multiple meaning makes it possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands. The interpretation of these words, as intentionally ambiguous as the words of the Delphic Pythia, eventually brings the different parties to blows, and everyone quotes in his favour passages from the writings of Marx and Engels to which authoritative importance is attached.