This Month's Quotation: Karl Marx (1936)

The Front Page quote from the July 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Ignorance never helped nor did anybody any good."

KarL Marx

This Month's Quotation: F. Engels. (1933)

The Front Page quote from the October 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses."

Frederick Engels

This Month's Quotation: Socialist (1938)

The Front Page quote from the October 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The Real Enemy of the Working Class is the Master Class. Workers Unite!"

Socialist Standard, December 1914. 

This Month's Quotation: Lord Lytton (1935)

The Front Page quote from the August 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Discover what will destroy life, and you are a great man."

Lord Lytton

This Month's Quotation

The quotation “Discover what will destroy life and you are a great man" is taken from “Zanoni" (Chapter IV) a novel by Lord Lytton.

This Month's Quotation: J. F. Bray (1936)

The Front Page quote from the August 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

"For popular revolutions to be effectual, conviction must always precede force; for force may establish, but it cannot always preserve."

J. F. Bray

This Month's Quotation

The quotation in the panel is from "Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy," 1839, by J. F. Bray.

This Month's Quotation: George Bernard Shaw (1937)

The Front Page quote from the August 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Let as therefore dismiss the fear that persons of exceptional ability need special inducements to exercise that ability to the utmost."

G. B. Shaw

This Month's Quotation

The quotation in the panel on the front page is from Shaw's "Intelligent Women's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism," Pelican Books Edition, P. 322.

Blogger's Note:

The Shaw book quoted from was reviewed in the August 1937 Socialist Standard by Edgar Hardcastle.

This Month's Quotation: Socialist (1934)

The Front Page quote from the July 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Socialism is a new system of Society, not a change of rulers. Administration of Capitalism by a Labour Government is not Socialism."

This Month's Quotation: A Prominent Communist. (1938)

The Front Page quote from the July 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

"There are no such things as defensive or aggressive wars under capitalism . . . Wars are not caused to 'defend democracy' . . . Wars are caused in the search for profit”

This Month's Quotation

Our Panel this month is taken from the New Leader (20/5/1938), who quote from the pamphlet, Labour & War, by Harry Pollitt, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934.

This Month's Quotation: J. F. Bray (1933)

The Front Page quote from the December 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

"It is not a form of Government which the working class must blame for their wrongs, but the system of society from which that form springs."

J. F. Bray (from "Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy", page 91, published 1839.)

Front Cover: Stalin - the God who fell (1961)

The Front Page of the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

I don't usually make a habit of dedicating a post to the front cover of a Socialist Standard but, in this case, the Editorial Committee obviously thought it was important to lay out some information on the front cover to pass comment on the Kremlinology of the day.

The picture on the front cover of the December 1961 Socialist Standard dates from March 1953 and it features the then Soviet Communist Party grandees standing guard around the body of Stalin who was lying in state. The text in the top right hand corner of the page above the picture names the grandees and their current political status in 1961:

SCENE: MOSCOW MARCH 1953 The eight most powerful men in Russia stand guard beside the body of their late chief - Stalin.

Dramatis Personae 

Left to right                Status December 1961

Molotov                  Ex foreign Minister (in disgrace)

Voroshilov          Ex President (in disgrace)

Beria                         Late Minister of Interior (shot as traitor)

Malenkov                  Ex Prime Minister (in disgrace) 

The Corpse              The God who fell

Bulganin                   Ex Prime Minister (in disgrace) 

Khruschev                Prime Minister (future?) 

Kaganovitch             Ex Vice-President (in disgrace) 

Mikoyan                  Deputy Prime Minister (future?)

In the bottom right hand corner of the front cover there is a quote from the article, From Lenin to Stalin by Ted Wilmott, which appeared in the April 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard:

From the Socialist Standard April 1953 

Maintenance of power at any price became for the Communist Party a matter of life and death. On a chequer board of political tactics the Old Bolshevik moved, mated and stayed, until the assumption of power rested in one man — Stalin . . . It was Stalin who completed the work begun by Lenin, the turning of Marxism a revolutionary doctrine into its opposite, an authoritarian ideology of state capitalism on a par and at times competing with other state ideologies, i.e. Hitler's National "Socialism" and Mussolini's Corporate State.

The front cover headline, Stalin - the God who fell, was the title of that month's editorial. 

This Month's Quotation: George Bernard Shaw (1936)

The Front Page quote from the December 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The most fundamental question today is the one we never mention. The extirpation of the legalised idlers who live by robbing the poor."

G. B. Shaw.

William Morris - socialist, artist, poet (1990)

The Front Page quote from the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Well, I say all this is war, and the result of war, the war this time, not of competing nations, but of competing firms or capitalist units: and it is this war of the firms which hinders the peace between nations which you surely have agreed with me in thinking is so necessary; for you must know that war is the very breath of the nostrils of these fighting firms, and they have now, in our times, got into their hands nearly all the political power, and they band together in each country in order to make their respective governments fulfil just two functions: the first is at home to act as a strong police force, to keep the ring in which the strong are beating down the weak; the second is to act as a piratical body-guard abroad, a petard to explode the doors which lead to the markets of the world."

- From How We Live and How We Might Live by William Morris

This Month's Quotation: Oscar Wilde (1938)

The Front Page quote from the September 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

"A man who does not think for himself  does not think at all. "

Oscar Wilde

This Month's Quotation: Oscar Wilde (1937)

The Front Page quote from the December 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard 

“To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.”

- Oscar Wilde

This Month's Quotation: Benito Mussolini (1938)

The Front Page quote from the May 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The Proletariat is anti-Patriotic by definition and by necessity . . . "

- Mussolini in 1909

This Month's Quotation: A Catholic Archbishop (1937)

The Front Page quote from the April 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The masses are ignorant and will always be so in regard to the fundamental problems of social life."

— A Catholic Archbishop

This Month's Quotation
The passage quoted is taken from a pastoral letter issued by the new Spanish Primate, Cardinal Isisoro Goma, Archbishop of Toledo. (See News Chronicle, March 16th, 1937.) The Archbishop also praises the Italian capitalists for their conquest of Abyssinia—"A work of civilisation"—and declares that "It is Spain's providential mission to save Christian civilisation from Marxism."

This Month's Quotation: Lord Lytton (1935)

The Front Page quote from the December 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "Discover some invention in machinery . . . that will make the rich more rich and the poor more poor, and they will build you a statue."

Lord Lytton

(From "Zanoni," Chapter 4, Page 229).

This Month's Quotation: Oscar Wilde (1938)

The Front Page quote from the April 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. 

                                                                                Oscar Wilde

This Month's Quotation: G. D. Herron (1941)

The Front Page quote from the December 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “The ignorance of the working-class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions—are superstitions fostered by intellectual mercenaries, by universities and churches, and by all the centres of privilege."

G. D. Herron

(Published in Upton Sinclair's "Cry for Justice,” Page 730)

This Month's Quotation: Benjamin Franklin (1941)

The Front Page quote from the November 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of life might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed In works of utility.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)