Fredy Perlman

“ MOKSA
Our dreams no longer matter because we no longer dream. It is we who are letting India die! We have books and religions that once inspired men to poetry, sculpture, architecture, philosophy. We had the finest cloth in the world even when the English could not tell men from wolves. Was not your father's cloth finer than any of the cheap English we have today?
NATHURAM
Those days are past, Krishna! The Europeans won! Our souls are diseased; India is dying--if this was not so, the Europeans would not have won! ”

“ Recognizing that imperialism is the most voracious beast that ever stalked the earth, that it is engaged in crimes of blood against humankind, and that it can only be destroyed by the people of the world picking up the sword and fighting it, we affirm the right and duty of all revolutionary peoples and classes to wage armed struggles for liberation, we commit ourselves to give concrete aid to these struggles wherever they arise, and we undertake to educate the people and prepare them and ourselves to wage a determined struggle with arms in hand to destroy imperialism in its lair. ”

“ She's your sister, Indio!
INDIO
If she ran away with an American, then she's not my sister! I hate her! I hate her! I hate the Europeans! I hate Pretoria as much as the Europeans! Why doesn't father want to fight against the Europeans, like Moses Burumba? It's Mr. Neriana that wants to sit alongside them.
CHUANA
The Europeans are men too. If your father fought against them, he would lose his spiritual freedom and become the same as they. Then not only his body would be enslaved, but his soul too. ”

“ INDIO
This is Indio, father!
MOKSA
Ah, I see you! You are my son, I am Krishna. You are the fire that burns my soul. You have killed your mother, Indio. You did not go to the factory.
INDIO
You always go back to the same thing. You're saying just what they want you to say: that everything they do to us is our own fault, or our poverty's fault--the same poverty they've given us is what causes our poverty! or else it's the communists' fault. It's never the fault of the Dutch or the English or the Americans; they're just peace-loving Businessmen going peacefully about their Business. ”

“ Early capitalists had a vantage point from which they could expose forever the feudal gap between the development of productive forces and the form of the social relations. As opposed to the high born whose power depended on social plunder and ceremonial waste, the power of early capitalists depended on the productive forces, and the growth of their power depended, not on plunder and waste, but on the further development of society's productive forces. Capitalism contemptuously kicked the corpse of its predecessor into a historical hole, designating it as a dark age, a pre-history of humanity. ”

“ When one was not engaged in official activity one did nothing. And is it the official project, the daily routine, the working day, the job, that suddenly explodes? Does one suddenly have to initiate a project with others so as not to miss a meal? Does one suddenly have to invent the content of every single minute of the living day? How is one to begin, and with whom? What is one to experience if not fear, desperation? No, one cannot dispense with managers. ”

“ INDIO
Stay, then! I've long forgotten I have a sister! I'll easily forget I have a brother!
MOKSA
(sits up, agitated)
You are causing this meeting to get out of hand, Moses Burumba. You are calling for violence! I should not have come to this meeting! I knew it would not be nonviolent. We must accept the world as it is; Moses Burumba. The best we can do is accept what is given to us. You want to destroy everything! I will not hear it! We must rise by our own talents and energies. Ah! You see! You are wrong! They are beating you, Moses Burumba. You are wrong, Moses Burumba! ”

“ Work is a hardship to be endured for its rewards.
Self-expression! Ah how the backward rationalize necessities!
What is the point of self-expression when you can have a task, a role, a function?
What point in understanding the universe when you can extend your physical being over it?
Work is a commodity, an asset in the acquisition of capital.
Capital means power over men, and over things. Mastery! Leisure! Personality!
Capital is a way of life! It is freedom!
With power over men and things, what need for work?
Who would choose drudgery then?
Except this dreg in India. ”

“ Before examining how such a situation creates the field out of which a revolutionary organization can seize power, we will examine what this situation consists of.
According to the classics, a revolution, a real, profound, a "people's" revolution, is the incredibly complicated and painful process of the death of the old and birth of the new social order, of the mode of life of tens of millions of people. It is set in motion by a mighty burst of creative enthusiasm that stems from the people themselves. The people and the people alone are the moving force, the creators of universal history. ”

“ THE PARTY'S STRUGGLE IS THE PEOPLE'S STRUGGLE. —Each new vanguard which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. ”

“ You are still a dreamer, Krishna.
MOKSA
While I dream, India lives. I see India on every bowl and there is India. Every bowl is a speck in the universe, and each contains the whole universe. When I no longer people my bowls, there will not be a universe. ”

“ From the moment when the historical purpose of a revolutionary organization is defined by hard facts, by historical events, revolutionary organizers can let hard facts speak. It is history that speaks. It is to history that they are responsible. It is by history that they are elected. It is history that defines their goal. It is no longer an individual's imaginings, insights or proofs that argue what is to be done, and by whom. ”

“ MOSES BURUMBA
(Vigorously)
We have accepted enough! In the fields we are horses and cattle; in the factories haulers and pushers. In the mines we are worms who crawl in and bury ourselves to dig out their stones.
MOKSA
I agree with Burumba. We are becoming like animals. The living day is no longer filled with man's fashioning his soul into the world. It is impossible to express ourselves in the mines. ”

“ As with all institutions in class society, the class that holds state power determines the nature of that institution. We want to lead workers and their allies in overthrowing the bourgeois state that controls, exploits, and takes our people's lives, and we say so openly. We want socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to destroy and bury imperialism. —True revolution in America is concerned with running this country and having programs to turn over the wealth and resources of the U.S. to the creative energies of the masses of the people. ”

“ The will, the longing, but also the force of thousands accumulates in every individual. The man who comes to such a meeting doubting and hesitating, leaves it confirmed in his mind: he has become the member of a community. —When an organization is rooted in the needs of the people, attacks on that organization or on its leaders are understood and resisted as a more visible form of the daily oppression of the entire people. —Thus the mass defense of the Party can be viewed as an opportunity to unite fragments around support of the group which is in the vanguard. ”

“ MOKSA
It was not the weakness of our souls but of our arms that gave Europeans the crown of India! The savage Portuguese saw vitality, culture and prosperity they had not dreamed existed. If we had fought them with their instruments, we would have won, we would have become a powerful empire of Portuguese Christians, we would today carry murder and death to every corner of the world. But then there would not be India. ”

“ What the individual can no longer do, money can do. And what the individual can no longer do includes everything that has become the prerogative of a special office: a profession, a specialized field, a discipline, a qualification, a license. With money, the individual is able to do what he is unable to do: he is able to buy the powers of an office, to engage an official. Through the paradox that constitutes capitalism's greatness, the individual is able to recover alienated self-powers in a strangely ambiguous form: he is able to build houses without exerting himself ”

“ But the masses can understand this only from their own experience. —Therefore, if, in order to lead a view of life to victory, we have to transform it into a fighting movement, the program of the movement has logically to consider the human material that it has at its disposal. As immovable as the final aims and the leading ideas must be, just as ingenious and psychologically correct must the method be, by which the propaganda program is orientated at the souls of those without whose help the most sublime idea would forever remain only an idea. ”

“ The Party is the organized political lever by means of which the more advanced part of the working class leads all the proletarian and semi-proletarian mass in the right direction. By internalizing the power of the party, by conferring on it the legitimacy of authority, human beings simultaneously internalize their own powerlessness. Every act which lies within the sphere of influence of the party is out of bounds for an individual. ”

“ To be good at translating the Party's policy into actions of the masses, to be good at getting not only the leading cadres but also the broad masses to understand and master every movement we launch—to be good at making the ideas of the ruling class the ruling ideas—this is an art of Marxist-Leninist leadership. —The class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. ”

“ However, just as the feudal authorities could not grant powers that did not in fact exist within feudalism, the State cannot grant the very powers whose negation is a precondition for its existence. Producers cannot acknowledge their power over the productive forces, even to themselves, since they still appear to themselves as free and law-abiding citizens of a representative democracy in which the public wielding of this power is illegal and immoral. They experience the appropriation of their own product as stealing and their direct regulation of production as sabotage, as criminal acts. ”

“ It devolves upon them to educate and organize, to instill class consciousness in the others and to bring them to life, so to speak, in the political-historical sense, as a self-conscious part of the class struggle. —The majority is thus permanently incapable of self-government. Even when the discontent of the masses culminates in a successful attempt to deprive the bourgeoisie of power, this is after all effected only in appearance; always and necessarily there springs from the masses a new organized minority which raises itself to the rank of a governing class. ”

“ Capitalism found it necessary to revive the ghost of its arch-enemy, to reconstitute the personified power of community, the State, and finally to magnify this power beyond all feudal dreams by enriching it with the productive power personified by Capital. ”

“ If the condition is dependence, why does classical theory point to independence? This seems like a paradox only if it is thought that the classical revolutionary theory is a single, unitary theory of revolution. The paradox disappears as soon as it is understood that the classical theory contains two separate and distinct theories of revolution. One is a theory of the class structure of capitalism and the conditions for its overthrow, the other is a theory of revolutionary organization and the conditions for its seizure of power. ”

“ On the other hand, there are functionaries who are invested with authority and who rule enterprises, institutions, whole branches of the economy, politics, culture, daily life and the State itself in its internal and external relations—not to speak of the Party which directs and organizes all these. They can give orders and make decisions which have the force of law. They form the ruling stratum of this socialist society, which leads every domain of life and monopolizes the totality of power. ”

“ It is the only class which in ending its own exploitation ends the exploitation of all classes. The proletariat leads with a party that represents the interests of the proletariat and has a mass base among the proletariat—a Marxist-Leninist party. —To put the matter less euphemistically, there exists a dictatorship in the hands of those leaders who have been sufficiently astute and sufficiently powerful to grasp the sceptre of dominion in the name of socialism, and to wrest it from the hands of the expiring bourgeois society. ”