Antonio Gramsci Quotes

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.

The majority in every society is always the backward. The diligent are no more than thirty percent of the society. It is a natural law that the diligent breed will exploit the backward breed as best they can, like the fish at sea, where the strong eat the weak. It is inconsequential whether the diligent are capitalists and merchants, as in the bourgeois government, or whether the diligent are the managers and supervisors, the intellectuals and the allotters as in the communist government. Ultimately, the diligent will exploit the laboring backward to the best of their ability.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.

Every capitalist who suffers from the competition of still greater capitalists denounces those above him and cries out for help on behalf of the middle class

Capitalists personally are often the mildest-mannered men that ever shattered a family or drained a workingman of his marrow.

I’m a big fan of the free market system but the free market system works [only] when you have robust competition.

That’s a very bourgeois notion. We’ve got enemies all around us, White Russians against the revolution, massive unemployment. We can’t have freedom of speech.

In the society of to-day the means of production are a monopoly of the capitalistic class; the dependence of the working classes which results from this is the cause of misery and of servitude in all its forms.

People are very much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo.

While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.

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?

The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers.

Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.

Communism is in conflict with human nature.

The slaves of socialism are slaves, but they are no one's property and therefore no one's loss.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Communists are great capitalists, so there is no threat anymore.

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.

It is this power structure which the Radical Right in the United States has been attacking for years in the belief that they are attacking the Communists.

In the Europe which was created by the Second World War, divided into two blocks, each in need of a revolution that would end the abuses and injustices of capitalism and the privileges of a bureaucratic caste, collective faith does not exist.

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.

I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism.

The greatest danger for our people [Nazi Party members] is not to be found in Marxism but rather in our middle class parties.