This is insisted on by people I loosely term the "Buttplug Left". That is they don't read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Kim Il Sung. They are mostly preoccupied with what they can shove up their arse and their political activity is relegated to this in its entirety
In that spirit I am collating every time some of the most outstanding communists used the word "degenerate" and perhaps Char can knock them into some good looking quote images. Mostly to trigger these red-libs
I'll start with the immortal Kim Il Sung Volume 1
Kim Il SungEven after the establishment of the socialist system, the remnants of the exploiting class remain for a long time, the corroding effect of the lingering outmoded ideas continues and, moreover, the imperialists’ ideological and cultural infiltration is intensifying continually. In these conditions, if ideological education is lax, schoolchildren may be affected by unsound ideas and become good-for-nothings who dislike struggle, and idle away their time seeking only personal comfort and pleasure. If the younger generation is infiltrated by corrupt ideas and becomes degenerate, there will be no heirs to our revolution. If this were to occur it would be impossible not only to continue with the revolution but to preserve the gains the revolution has achieved.
Kim Il SungThe anti-Party, counterrevolutionary elements who have recently been exposed and criticized are not only political careerists and conspirators; they are also turncoats of the revolution and Right-wing capitulationists who are degenerated in their class character and have become deteriorated ideologically.
Kim Il SungThe manoeuvres of the US and other imperialists now consist, on the one hand, of threatening the peoples of the revolutionary countries by nuclear blackmail and, on the other, of undermining the socialist states from within by infiltrating bourgeois ideas and culture into them. The bourgeois art and literature spread by imperialists inflict serious harmful damage by reducing people to spiritual cripples or moral degenerates and instigating them to counterrevolution by sending the wind of “freedom.” They instil all kinds of immorality and depravity, sexual passion, murder, plunder, sorrow and despair.
In the face of the serious historical lesson, the modern revisionists, enslaved by the illusions of imperialism, praise bourgeois art and literature and the bourgeois way of life, and reject the spirit of the Party, the working class and the people in socialist art and literature, attempting to obliterate the traditions of revolutionary art and literature and opposing the Party’s leadership in this area.
Kim Il SungIn artistic and literary works created recently the love of young men and women is often described in terms of triangular love affairs. In the long story entitled The Fog Creeps over a New Hill, the love affair of heroes and heroines has been set in a triangular mode. Triangular love is a dissolute and philistine form of love and a mode of depiction habitually used by morally-degenerate bourgeois writers.
Kim Il SungForbidding them to criticize their officers was not for the good of the officers themselves. If they value and love the officers sincerely, they should make a strong demand for their Party life and criticize them strictly. Without education and control a man will naturally degenerate. Many officers who were free from the education and control of the Party in the past lagged behind ideologically, behaved haughtily and bureaucratically and ultimately committed grave errors.
Kim Il SungIf soldiers are not equipped with the revolutionary ideology of the leader, they may degenerate under the influence of unsound ideologies and fail to follow the road of revolution faithfully.
Kim Il SungIf an intensive campaign to transform intellectuals on a revolutionary pattern and assimilate them to the working class is not launched, egoism, liberalism and other outmoded ideological survivals may increase and they may degenerate ideologically under the influence of dogmatism and revisionism.
Kim Il SungThose who dislike and neglect organizational life will become degenerate ideologically and, in the long run, stray from the path of the revolution.