Marx, Engels and a reflex that deems democracy protection unworthy, which is just a cover for having nothing to protect it with.
Engels - "The practical revolutionary experience of 1848-49 confirmed the reasonings of theory, which led to the conclusion that the democracy of the petty traders must first have its turn, before the Communist working class could hope to permanently establish itself in power"
MARX - "May the devil take these peoples movements, especially when they are "peaceful""
Marx: "It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away."
Engels - The French Revolution was the rise of democracy in Europe. Democracy is, as I take all forms of government to be, a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypocrisy (theology, as we Germans call it), at the bottom. Political liberty is sham-liberty, the worst possible sort of slavery; the appearance of liberty, and therefore the worst servitude. Just so also is political equality for me; therefore democracy, as well as every other form of government, must ultimately break to pieces.
Engels to Wilhelm Blos, February 21, 1874: “The man is too wise. And on top of that, such offensive, vulgar, democratic arguments! To denigrate violence as something to be rejected, when we all know that in the end nothing can be achieved without violence!”
Marx to Engels, February 10. 1866: "I will chew out Wilhelm [Liebknecht] with a few lines about his feebleness. For what we want is exactly the demise of the “Social-Democrat” and of all that Lassalle-crap".
Marx to Engels,25 February 1859: "Those dogs of democrats and liberal riff-raff will see that we're the only chaps who haven't been stultified by the ghastly period of peace."
Marx to Engels, December 17, 1858: "The industriousness of these little Baden fleas, bred from democratic piss-sewage, is touching.”
Marx: "Margin notes to the Program of the German Labor Party", 1875: “Between the capitalist and the communist society is the era of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other. This corresponds to a political transitional era, in which the State cannot be anything except the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Now the Program has nothing to do with the latter, nor with the nature of the future State in communist society. Its political demands contain nothing besides the generally known democratic litany: universal voting rights, direct legislation, popular justice, a people’s militia etc. ....
But the entire Program, in spite of all its democratic bells and whistles, is completely infested by the Lassalle sect’s abject belief in the State or, even worse, by democratic faith in miracles. (…)"
Interview with Karl Marx, Chicago Tribune, January 5 1879: "Well, then, to carry out the principles of socialism do its believers advocate assassination and bloodshed?" "No great movement," Karl answered, "has ever been inaugurated Without Bloodshed."
