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Sections (Content) :
• 1
...this organization must not only be based upon the class struggle, but must express the economic condition of this time. We must have one organization that embraces the workers in every department of industrial activity. It must express the class struggle. It must recognize the class lines. It must of course be class-conscious. It must be totally uncompromising. It must be an organization of the rank and file. It must be so organized and so guided as to appeal to the intelligence of the workers of the country everywhere. And if we succeed, as I believe we will, in forming such an organization, its success is a foregone conclusion.
• 2
Since the rise of capitalism, the working class has grown in many ways. It has grown in numbers until it includes almost everybody.
• 3
Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to make all his life the eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a watch, while he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to expend elsewhere. Often, too, he is a rebel who cannot submit to being fixed all his life to a work-bench in order to procure a thousand pleasures for his employer, while knowing himself to be far the less stupid of the two, and knowing his only fault to be that of having been born in hovel instead of coming into the world in a castle.
• 4
[...we are] convinced that for all that mass of population, terribly maltreated for centuries, the problem of bread is the problem of mental emancipation, of freedom and humanity.
• 5
The plan of undertaking mass strikes as a serious political class action with organized workers only is absolutely hopeless. If the mass strike, or rather, mass strikes, and the mass struggle are to be successful they must become a real people's movement, that is, the widest sections of the proletariat must be drawn into the fight.
• 6
...the Government has promptly rushed in and driven Labor to defend itself. At this stage in the evolution of the working-class such an attack will consolidate the workers as a class and show the capitalist nature of the Government more than millions of speeches could do.
• 7
Today, I believe, there is no-one, or almost no-one among us who would deny the usefulness of and the need for the labor movement as a mass means of material and moral advancement, as a fertile ground for propaganda and as an indispensable force for the social transformation that is our goal. There is no longer anyone who does not understand what the workers' organization means, to us anarchists more than to anyone, believing as we do that the new social organization must not and cannot be imposed by a new government by force but must result from the free cooperation of all. Moreover, the labor movement is now an important and universal institution. To oppose it would be to become the oppressors' accomplices; to ignore it would be to put us out of reach of people's everyday lives and condemn us to perpetual powerlessness.
• 8
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.
• 9
There can be no true humanity, no true self-respect, without self-reliance. No one can help you if you do not help yourselves. We do not promise to do anything for you, we do not want anything from you, we only appeal to you to co-operate with us to bring about a state of society which will make freedom, well-being possible for all.
• 10
Force may overthrow governments, and set up governments, but even governments cannot long remain, unless they obtain the acquiescence of the governed. Still more an equalitarian society, functioning, not under authority and economic pressure, but by the common will, can never arise and flourish save by the active cooperation of the masses.
Let us face the facts, comrades, the education of the masses is a large and strenuous task, but there can be no communism until the masses desire Communism and act Communism.
We cannot take part in the work of education till we are ourselves deeply imbued with the Communist ideal and unless our thoughts and our desires are constantly turning towards it.
• 11
Labor gains only now and then a direct advantage, a favorable legal enactment; but always an indirect one, the enlightenment of the masses as to the nature of society and the state.
• 12
...only mass attacks and mass strikes lead to the overthrow of the old domination.
• 13
...that "the whole people" chiefly consists of workers, who were quite able, being producing personnels, to manage the industry, that consists of their own work.
• 14
Why should these countless fathers and mothers, almost one million times greater in number, surrender to these few monster exploiters -- to this Capitalistic System which bases its existence on the fiendish exploitation, and ultimate murder of these children?
• 15
The laborers form the mass of every community. The inquiry into the causes affecting wages is, therefore, the most important branch of political economy.
• 16
If government should propose, as an object, the advantage of any one class in the nation at the expense of the rest, this class ought to be precisely the class of day-laborers. They are more numerous than any other; and to secure their happiness is to make the greatest portion of the nation happy. They have fewer enjoyments than any other; they obtain less advantage than any other from the constitution of society; they produce wealth, and themselves obtain scarcely any share of it.
• 17
They [workers] form the poorest class of society, but also the most numerous...
• 18
...the lower classes of the people (by far the most numerous in all countries and in all ages)...
• 19
...for no social system can be durable or stable, under which the majority does not enjoy equal rights but is kept in a servile position, and is bound by exceptional laws. Only when the laboring majority have the same rights as other citizens, and are freed from shameful disabilities, is a firm order of society possible.
Chronology :
April 14, 2020 : The Masses -- Added.
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