What, then, is the value of labouring power?

Like that of every other commodity, its value is determined by the quantity of labour necessary to produce it. The labouring power of a man exists only in his living individuality. A certain mass of necessaries must be consumed by a man to grow up and maintain his life. But the man, like the machine, will wear out, and must be replaced by another man. Beside the mass of necessaries required for his own maintenance, he wants another amount of necessaries to bring up a certain quota of children that are to replace him on the labour market and to perpetuate the race of labourers. Moreover, to develop his labouring power, and acquire a given skill, another amount of values must be spent. For our purpose it suffices to consider only average labour, the costs of whose education and development are vanishing magnitudes. Still I must seize upon this occasion to state that, as the costs of producing labouring powers of different quality differ, so much differ the values of the labouring powers employed in different trades. The cry for an equality of wages rests, therefore, upon a mistake, is an inane wish never to be fulfilled. It is an offspring of that false and superficial radicalism that accepts premises and tries to evade conclusions. Upon the basis of the wages system the value of labouring power is settled like that of every other commodity; and as different kinds of labouring power have different values, or require different quantities of labour for their production, they must fetch different prices in the labour market. To clamour for equal or even equitable retribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question. The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production? After what has been said, it will be seen that the value of labouring power is determined by the value of the necessaries required to produce, develop, maintain, and perpetuate the labouring power.

Karl Marx
Value, Price and Profit

she looks about her and finds her children crying for bread. She is desperate, but she must not appeal or complain to any one. She must hold her tongue and suffer inwardly. But how can she silence her children? She must not even share the sympathy of her husband at the front, because that cripples her soldier husband's fighting powers. Her soldier husband must `hold on' and 'steal' in the land of her neighbors. He must hold on and 'suffer' because the capitalists, the hurrah patriots and the armor-plate kings have willed it so. Every one must keep his or her tongue between the teeth, for the war profiteers must make money out of the want and misery of the wives and their husband soldiers at the front.

Karl Liebknecht
The Future Belongs to the People

The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agrarian territories, but even most highly industrialised regions (German appetite for Belgium; French appetite for Lorraine), because (1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.)

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

Actually, it is precisely the bourgeoisie that has always played the hypocrite by characterising formal equality as “democracy”, and in practice using force against the poor, the working people, the small peasants and the workers, by employing countless means of deception, oppression, etc. The imperialist war (that the Scbeidemanns and the Kautskys painted in shamelessly bright colours) has made this plain to millions of people. Proletarian dictatorship is the sole means of defending the working people against the oppression of capital, the violence of bourgeois military dictatorship, and imperialist war. Proletarian dictatorship is the sole step to equality and democracy in practice, not on paper, but in life, not in political phrase-mongering, but in economic reality.

V. I. Lenin
Greetings To Italian, French and German Communists

October signifies the ideological victory of communism over Social-Democratism, of Marxism over reformism.

Formerly, before the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the U.S.S. R., the Social-Democrats and reformists could flaunt the banner of Marxism, could coquet with Marx and Engels, etc., for that was not dangerous for the bourgeoisie, and people did not yet know what the victory of Marxism could lead to.

Now, after the victory of the proletarian dictatorship in the U.S.S.R., when everybody realises what Marxism leads to and what its victory may signify, the Social-Democrats and reformists, sensing the danger to the bourgeoisie of such flaunting and coquetting with Marxism, have preferred to dissociate themselves from Marxism.

Henceforth, communism is the only shelter and bulwark of Marxism.

J. V. Stalin
Synopsis of the Article "The International Character of the October Revolution"
October 1927

Wars and all their calamities are produced by capitalism, which keeps millions of working people in bondage, sharpens the struggle between nations, and turns the slaves of capital into cannon fodder. A world-wide socialist army of the revolutionary proletariat is alone capable of putting an end to this oppression and enslavement of the masses and to these massacres of slaves in the interests of the slave-owners.

V. I. Lenin
To All the Citizens of Russia

If socialism is not victorious, peace between the capitalist States will be only a truce, an interlude, a time of preparation for a fresh slaughter of the peoples. Peace and bread are the basic demands of the workers and the exploited. The war has made these demands extremely urgent. The war has brought hunger to the most civilised countries, to those most culturally developed. On the other hand, the war, as a tremendous historical process, has accelerated social development to an unheard-of degree. Capitalism had developed into imperialism, i.e., into monopoly capitalism, and under the influence of the war it has become state monopoly capitalism. We have now reached the stage of world economy that is the immediate stepping stone to socialism.

V. I. Lenin
For Bread And Peace

There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war. War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property—on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.

V. I. Lenin
On the Slogan for a United States of Europe