[Societe des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen] ...in the social revolution which begins, the Society... places itself... between the PARIAHS and the PRIVILEGED of the old society; to the first it says: remain united, but calm, there is your strength. Your number is such that it will be enough to demonstrate your will to obtain what you desire; it is also such that you are only able to desire what is just; your voice and your will are the voice and will of God! To the other it says: The old social form has disappeared, the reign of privilege and exploitation has passed... (From: Chapter 3: February - June 1848, Page 113..)
[Anonymous Pirate Radio Broadcaster] This movement has made all of us see the people around us in a new way. Instead of thinking that problems belong to someone else, we have understood how we are all affected, both locally and globally. On the streets, we learned to be more human. (From: Chapter 14: Students and Neighbors at the Barricad....)
[Anonymous nun] No one knew what lay behind all those masses of people, one was fighting the unknown. (From: Chapter 11: Section B: Tuesday, July 27, Page 226..)
Thus the sole aim of a secret society must be, not the creation of an artificial power outside the people, but the rousing, uniting and organizing of the spontaneous power of the people; therefore, the only possible, the only real revolutionary army is not outside the people, it is the people itself. It is impossible to arouse the people artificially. People's revolutions are born from the course of events....
...we should have only one revolutionary army: the people--the organization should only be the staff of this army, an organizer of the people's power, not its own... A revolutionary idea is revolutionary, vital, real and true only because it expresses and only as far as it represents popular instincts which are the result of history. To strive to foist on the people your own thoughts--foreign to its instinct--implies a wish to make it subservient to a new state... The organization must accept in all sincerity the idea that it is a servant and a helper, but never a commander of the people, never under any pretext its manager, not even under the pretext of the people's welfare.
Everything else can and must be accomplished by the people themselves. Otherwise we would arrive at political dictatorship; that is, a re-instatement of the State, privilege, inequality, persecution; a reestablishment, by a long and roundabout way, of political, social, and economic slavery.
One must have the potential support of the widest masses of people before any revolution can be successful. (From: Section 8: The Spanish Revolution Revisited by Rus....)
...the process of building a new society, like the process of revolution itself, is seen as either being the work of the people themselves, or as being doomed from the start. (From: Part 1, Chapter 2: Recognizing the New Society, Pa....)
You are in an overwhelming majority. There are only a few capitalists as compared to you. And yet, they own practically everything and rule the land; and will keep on owning and ruling the land as long as you workingmen allow them to; and you will allow them to as long as you persist in remaining divided in trade unions and being used against each other, instead of uniting and acting solidly with and for each other and against the capitalists.
...there will be a great difference between a strike of revolutionary workers and a strike of ignorant trade unionists who but vaguely understand what they want or how to get it.
The modern phenomenon of people's war has added a new dimension to the revolutionary process. Spontaneity has been replaced with calculation, the popular uprising with the concept of a protracted conflict. (From: Chapter 13: Prospect and Retrospect, Page 351..)
We want a revolution for the people and by the people, because proletarian liberation is impossible otherwise... (From: Second Part: The Militant (1931-1936), Section 14:....)
I do not blame the suitors' overconfidence, rough ways and violence, in eating up his household; they risk their lives, supposing that the master will never come back home. But I do blame you others, sitting passive, never speaking against them, though you far outnumber them. (From: Book 2: A Dangerous Journey, Page 127..)
If the question had merely been how best to elaborate a theory, we should have said theories, as theories, are not of so very much importance. But as long as a new idea has not found a clear, precise form of statement, growing naturally out of things as they actually exist, it does not take hold of men's minds, does not inspire them to enter upon a decisive struggle. The people do not fling themselves into the unknown without some positive and clearly formulated idea to serve them, so to say, as a springboard when they reach the starting point.
As for this starting point, they must be led up to it by life itself. (From: Part I..)
...it is futile to suppose a movement of reform can be brought about by an act of legislature alone. Its successful accomplishment presupposes changes so great as to amount to a social revolution. (From: Preface to the English Edition, Page 9..)
The true reformer does not come to discourage men with the false news that they are worse than they were, but to wake them to the new powers to which they have grown while they slept. (From: Chapter 7..)
We live at a time in which no more advantages can be gained in parliament for the proletariat. This is why the masses themselves must enter the theater of action.
The month of October 1917 is a great historical watershed in the Russian revolution. That watershed consists of the awakening of the toilers of town and country to their right to seize control of their own lives and their social and economic inheritance; the cultivation of the soil, the housing, the factories, the mines, transportation, and lastly the education which had hitherto been used to strip our ancestors of these assets.
While preaching against every kind of government, and demanding complete freedom, we must support all struggles for partial freedom, because we are convinced that one learns through struggle, and that once one begins to enjoy a little freedom one ends by wanting it all. We must always be with the people, and when we do not succeed in getting them to demand a lot we must still seek to get them to want something; and we must make every effort to get them to understand that however much or little they may demand should be obtained by their own efforts and that they should despise and detest whoever is part of, or aspires to, government.
Peace ought to be imposed by bringing about the Revolution, or at least by threatening to do so. To the present time, the strength or the skill is wanting.
Well! There is only one remedy: to do better in future. More than ever we must avoid compromise; deepen the chasm between capitalists and wage slaves, between rulers and ruled; preach expropriation of private property and the destruction of States as the only means of guaranteeing fraternity between the peoples and Justice and Liberty for all; and we must prepare to accomplish these things.
In such times you see the nameless, the unknowns from some far-flung village or obscure factory stoically braving every vicissitude. You see the first of them, without any great ado, reach the enemy parapet and wrest away some weapon or flag: only to vanish in a trice, his disappearance every bit as obscure as his life before it. He will be laid away on some gully or hillside where no-one sets foot. (From: Section 15: Glimpses of La Puebla, Page 19..)
As for the masses, they are thoroughly rebellious, but completely ignorant. They want to free themselves, but do not know how to go about doing so. (From: Chapter 2: The Rise of the Revolutionary Movement ....)
Any revolution that's not based on the profound discontent of the mass of the population may merely result in an abortive insurrection. (From: Chapter 8: The Marxist World View and Revolutions ....)
...in revolutionary war, just as in war between nations, nothing is obtained without an adequate effect of massive numbers. (From: Chapter 8: The Marxist World View and Revolutions ....)
When the aims are too narrow there can be no real liberation. When the aim is a semi- or mock-liberation, the inner forces aroused are insufficient to bring about fundamental results.
What millions and millions of men and women are calling for from the depths of their collective consciousness is an immediate radical change in the political and economic situation.
And still they remain in the city; there they are, ready to sting and fully armed, and some of them owe money, some have forfeited their citizenship; a third class are in both predicaments; and they hate and conspire against those who have got their property, and against everybody else, and are eager for revolution.... (From: Book 8..)
To most wealthy men, to the men who had dominated society during the two previous regimes, the masses were an unknown -- it was this mystery of their existence and desires which made the situation so especially ominous. A once familiar world was disorganized, men's expectations as to their future role in society, activity planned for the near future, all was thrown into doubt. The result was a dazed or stunned acceptance of what had occurred, which was allied with the desire to make the best of what must have seemed irreversible. (From: Chapter 3: February - June 1848, Pages 96-7..)
The doctrines of the catechism become our principles before we find it out, and no longer brook rejection. Their thought, or -- mind, has the sole power, and no protest of the "flesh" is further listened to. Nevertheless it is only through the "flesh" that I can break tyranny of mind; for it is only when a man hears his flesh along with the rest of him that he hears himself wholly, and it is only when he wholly hears himself that he is a hearing or rational being. The Christian does not hear the agony of his enthralled nature, but lives in "humility"; therefore he does not grumble at the wrong which befalls his person; he thinks himself satisfied with the "freedom of the spirit." (From: Part 1, Chapter II, Section 2, Sub-Section 2..)
In the Revolution it was not the individual who acted so as to affect the world's history, but a people... (From: Part 1, Chapter II, Section 3, Sub-Section 1..)
I cannot help thinking of you as you deserve, ye governments. Can you dry up the fountains of thought? High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever recreates man. When you have caught and hung all these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt, for you have not struck at the fountain-head.
I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came?—till you and I came over to him? The very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes.
