Skimmed through Jail Diary of Bhagat Singh which is essentially a collection of notes and ideas he jotted down from the books he read while imprisoned under British rule, awaiting execution. It’s profoundly moving to glimpse the mind of a revolutionary.
WASTES OF CAPITALISM
Economic estimate about Australia by Theodore Hertzka (1886)
Every family = 5-roomed 40 ft. sq. house
to last for 50 years.
Worker’s workable age: 16-50.
So, we have 5,000,000.
Labour of 615,000 workers is sufficient to produce
food for 22,000,000 people = 12.3% of labour.
Including labour cost of transport, luxuries need only
315,000 = 6.33% worker’s labour.
That amounts to this that 20% of the available labour is enough for
supporting the whole of the continent. The rest 80% is exploited and wasted
due to capitalist order of society.
In a capitalist regime, the whole machinery of democracy operates to keep
the ruling class minority in power through the sufferage of the working
class majority, and when the bourgeois government feels itself endangered
by democratic institutions, such institutions are often crushed without
compunction.
From Marx to Lenin
by Morris Hillquiet
KARL MARX ON RELIGION
Man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion, indeed, is the
self-consciousness and the self-feeling of man who either has not yet found
himself, or else (has found himself) has lost himself once more. But man is
not an abstract being squatting down somewhere outside the world. Man is
the world of men, the state, society. This state, this society produces
religion, produces a perverted world consciousness because they are a
perverted world. Religion is the generalised theory of this world, its
encyclopaedic compend, its logic in a popular form . . . The fight against
religion is, therefore, a direct campaign against the world whose spiritual
aroma is religion.
(Contd.)
Religion is the sigh of oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world
just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The people cannot be really happy until they have been deprived of
illusory happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the people
should shake itself free of illusion as to its own condition is the demand that
it should abandon a condition which needs illusion.
The weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Physical
force must be overthrown by physical force; but theory, too, becomes a
physical force as soon as it takes possession of the masses.
Dil de to is mizaaj kaa parvardigaar de
Jo gham ki ghari ko bhi khushi se guzaar de
Sajaa kar mayyiat-i-ummeed naakaami ke phoolon se
Kisi hamdard ne rakh di mere toote hue dil mein



