Frases de Leon Trotsky

página 4

“Expor aos oprimidos a verdade sobre a situação é abrir-lhes o caminho da revolução.”

“A crise histórica da humanidade reduz-se à crise da direção revolucionária…. A crise de direção do proletariado, que se tornou a crise da civilização humana, somente pode ser resolvida pela Quarta Internacional.”

“É preciso conhecer os limites da força. É preciso saber quando combinar força com estratégia.”

“O fim pode justificar os meios, desde que haja algo que justifique o fim.”

“Num país em que o único empregador é o Estado, oposição significa morte lenta por inanição. O velho princípio 'quem não trabalha não come' foi substituído por outro: 'quem não obedece não come'.”

“Morro com a certeza inabalável no futuro comunista da humanidade. Essa certeza me dá hoje uma força que religião nenhuma poderia dar.”

“A violência bem organizada parecia ser para ele a menor distância entre dois pontos.”

“Com um heroísmo sem precedentes, num fato militar inaudito na história desta guerra, nossos cadetes e nossas unidades do Exército Vermelho tomaram de assalto uma fortaleza naval de primeira linha. Sem darem um tiro sequer, eles progrediram sobre o gelo, e pereceram. Eles venceram, esses filhos da Rússia operária e camponesa leais à revolução. O povo trabalhador da Rússia e do mundo não os esquecerá.”

“A propriedade do Estado não é a de 'todo povo', mas que na medida em que desaparecem os privilégios e as distinções sociais e em que, em consequência, o Estado perde sua razão de ser. Dito de outra maneira: a propriedade do Estado se faz socialista a medida que deixa de ser propriedade do Estado.”

“A URSS é uma sociedade intermediária entre o capitalismo e o socialismo, na qual: a) A forças produtivas são ainda insuficientes para dar a propriedade do Estado um caráter socialista; …g) A evolução das contradições acumuladas podem conduzir ao socialismo ou lançar a sociedade rumo ao capitalismo.”

“Ainda bem que os camponeses russos são analfabetos e não podem ler as besteiras que escrevem em jornais e livros desse país.”

“A guerra civil, forma culminante da luta de classes abole violentamente todos os liames morais entre classes inimigas.”

“The peasantry, having lifted itself up out of its medieval status, cannot politically generate it's own rage. — Speech in Paris, 1934”

“Lenin's methods [of "hard" centralism and mistrust of the working class] lead to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a "dictator" substitutes himself for the central committee. … The party must seek the guarantee of its stability in its own base, in an active and self-reliant proletariat, and not in its top caucus … which the revolution may suddenly sweep away with its wing.”

“The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a "self-made" man arising from this movement.”

“In times of peace, the capitalists used to guarantee their interests by means of the "peaceful" robbery of hired labor. During the war they served those same interests by means of the destruction of countless human lives.”

“Terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation.”

“The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state … Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i. e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.”

“No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study.”

“In a revolutionary period, the party which has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.”

“It could and must, be explained that in the civil war we destroyed the White Guards in order that they should not destroy the workers. Consequently, our problem is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the destruction of human life - a puzzle the dialectical secret of which was explained by old Hegel, without reckoning other still more ancient sages.”

“The political worshipers of routine, incapable of surveying the historical process in its complexity, in its internal clashes and contradictions, imagined to themselves that history was preparing the way for the Socialist order simultaneously and systematically on all sides, so that concentration of production and the development of a Communist morality in the producer and the consumer mature simultaneously with the electric plough and a parliamentary majority.”

“The balance of political power at any given moment is determined under the influences of fundamental and secondary factors of differing degrees of effectiveness, and only in its fundamental quality is it determined by the state of the development of production.”

“The argument which is repeated again and again in criticisms of the Soviet system in Russia, and particularly in criticisms of revolutionary attempts to set up a similar structure in other countries, is the argument based on the balance of power.”

“Leninism is orthodox, obdurate, irreducible, but it does not contain so much as a hint of formalism, canon, not bureaucratism. In the struggle, it takes the bull by the horns. To make out of the traditions of Leninism a supra-theoretical guarantee of the infallibility of all the words and thoughts of the interpreters of these traditions, is to scoff at genuine revolutionary tradition and transform it into official bureaucratism. It is ridiculous and pathetic to try to hypnotize a great revolutionary party by repetition of the same formulae, according to which the right line should be sought not in essence of each question, not in the methods of posing and solving this question, but in formation of a biographical character.”

“Leninism is warlike from head to foot. War is impossible without cunning, without subterfuge. without deception of the enemy. Victorious war cunning is a constituent element of Leninist politics. But at the same time, Leninism is supreme revolutionary honesty toward the party and the working class. It admits of no fiction, no bubble-blowing, no pseudo-grandeur.”

“Lenin cannot be chopped up into quotations suited for every possible case, because for Lenin the formula never stands higher than the reality; it is always the tool that makes it possible to grasp the reality and to dominate it. It would not be hard to find in Lenin dozens and hundreds of passages which, formally speaking, seem to be contradictory. But what must be seen is not the formal relationship of one passage to another, but the real relationship of each of them to the concrete reality in which the formula was introduced as a lever. The Leninist truth is always concrete!”