Socialism or Barbarism

The French Revolution

Reform or Revolution

Eight-Hour Day — How to Win Reforms

Stagnation and Progress of Marxism

Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy

Socialism and the Churches

The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions

Blanquism and Social Democracy

The National Question p. 136

The duty of the class party of the proletariat to protest and resist national oppression arises not from any special ‘right of nations’, just as for example, in striving for the social and political equality of sexes does not at all result from any special ‘right of women’ which the movement of bourgeois emancipation refers to. This duty arises solely from the general opposition to the class regime and to every form of social inequality and social domination, in a word, from the basic position of socialism.

p. 137

The formula, ‘the right of nations to self-determination’, is essentially not a political and problematic guideline in the nationality question, but only a means of avoiding that question...

The historical dialectic has shown that there are no ‘eternal’ truths and that there are no ‘rights’... In the words of Engels, ‘What is good in the here and now, is evil somewhere else, and vice versa’ — or what is right and reasonable under some circumstances becomes nonsense and absurdity under others. Historical materialism has taught us that the real content of these ‘eternal’ truths, rights, and formulae is determined only by the material social conditions of the environment in a given historical epoch.

Present-Day Social Democracy long since stopped regarding such phrases as ‘democracy’, ‘national freedom’, ‘equality’, and other such beautiful things as eternal truths and laws transending particular nations and times.

p. 138

When Napoleon or any other despot of his ilk uses a plebicite, the extreme form of political democracy, for the goals of Caesarism, taking advantage of the political ignorance and economic subjection of the masses, we do not hesitate for a moment to come out wholeheartedly against that ‘democracy’, and are not put off for a moment by the majesty or the omnipotence of the people, which, for the metaphysicians of bourgeois democracy, is something like a sacrosanct idol.
When a German like Tessendorf or a tsarist gendarme, or a ‘truly Polish’ National Democrat defends the ‘personal freedom’ of strikebreakers, protecting them against the moral and material pressure of organised labour, we don't hesitate a minute to support the latter [...]
When, finally, liberals of the Manchester School demand that the wage worker be left completely to his fate in the struggle with capital in the name of ‘the equality of citizens’, we unmask that metaphysical cliché which conceals the most glaring economic inequality [...]...

p. 140

The return of all, or even the majority of the nations which are today oppressed, to independence would only be possible if the existence of small states in the era of capitalism had any chances or hopes for the future.

p. 142

The concept of the ‘nation’ is one of those categories of bourgeois ideology which Marxist theory submitted to a radical re-vision, showing how that mistly veil [...] conceals in every case a definite historical content.
In a class society, ‘the nation’ as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather there exists within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and ‘rights’.

p. 143

Social democracy is the class party of proletariat [...] Thus, Social Democracy is called upon to realise not the right of nations to self-determination but only the right of the working class, which is exploited and oppressed, of the proletariat, to self-determination.

Theory and Practice

Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle

Lassalle's Legacy

The Accumulation of Capital — An Anti-Critique p. 185

If the workers only produced as much as they actually needed, then from the standpoint of capital it would be pointless to employ them.

The Crisis of German Social Democracy (The Junius Pamphlet)

Two Prison Letters to Sonya Liebknecht

The Russian Revolutionp. 232

Freedom only for the supporters of the government [...] is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special priviledge.

p. 234

It is rule by terror which demoralises.

Founding Convention of the German Communist Party

Order Prevails in Berlin