Herman Gorter Quotes

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

It did not occur to us that the Marxists' solution was fraudulent or that their vision was distorted, that whatever the wrongs in our society it was not the ideology of theirs that will cure them.

It is the historical mission of the Communist International to be the gravedigger of bourgeois society.

Marxist revolutions generally happened in countries that otherwise could not have carried out an industrial revolution.

The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.

We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx and Lenin and Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, and anybody else who ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle.

Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.

For the Russian masses, the proletarians, knew for certain, and already saw during the war, and in part before their very eyes, that the peasants would soon be on their side.

The revolution... is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

Bourgeois humor is always bankrupt; it is mortgaged to Red radicalism.

Our party is a party of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletarian revolution is the only solution of the labour problem and all our work must lead to this goal.

A political movement is that in which the proletarians as a class exert pressure against the ruling classes.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Only idiots think that the proletariat will win a majority right away. First we topple the bourgeoisie. Then we seize power. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Harmony? No! Class war! Hatred to the death for the criminal bourgeoisie!

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

Who, if not the revolutionary intelligentsia, could promote the political development of the working class?

If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?

If every one of those good words - liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, human rights - has been called "bourgeois", what on earth does that leave for us?

If you turn your people into bourgeois, you also turn them into pacifists.

Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.

The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system …. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, sooner or later revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.

In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.

The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation.