Fredy Perlman

“ With a doctrine that in great lines is actually correct, it is less harmful to retain a formulation, even if in reality it were no longer quite up to date, than to deliver, by its correction, to general discussion and all its most evil consequences, a principle of the movement that so far has been looked upon as made of granite. This is impossible above all as long as the movement itself is still fighting for victory. For how does one think to fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine if by continued changes in its outward construction one spreads uncertainty and doubt? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Was there ever a government in history that was based exclusively on the consent of the people and renounced any and every use of force? A government so constituted there never was and there never will be. Consent is as changeable as the formations in the sands of the seashore. We cannot have it always. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are among the best lodged, best fed and best entertained members of modern society. Yet their behavior exhibits a complete dissociation between their apparently human powers of perception and the inhuman consequences of their actions. Like the one-year old child who blows up a house by turning on the oven gas without lighting the oven fire, these seeming adults continue to grin and play, remaining completely innocent of their own deeds. ”

“ If an individual who had not dis�obeyed the laws was nevertheless punished, the punishment itself proved that the individual was bad, morally depraved. If that were not the case, if the Authorities acted arbitrarily and punished individuals according to unpredictable whims, the situation would have been unbearable. One would have lived in constant fear. One could not dispense with morality. One had to assume that the Authorities punished only the bad - and for one's peace of mind one had to see to it that the Authorities punished anyone who visibly broke a law, no matter how modestly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just as the characteristics of the revolutionary army -discipline and obedience - are precisely the characteristics which workers already possess under capitalism, the characteristics of the leaders are precisely the characteristics of leaders in capitalist society. But the leaders of capitalism are the bourgeoisie, the enemy. ”

“ Athena, goddess of reason, had triumphed at last; enlightenment and clarity were re born after a long sleep, an unexplained amnesia. Never again would plunder and war be means to social power; never again would greatness coincide with the destruction of society's productive forces. ”

“ What develops under the hegemony of the dominant form of behavior, at the centers of production of Capital, is not a consciousness, an ideology, or even an organized revolutionary movement, but rather a practice, a form of social behavior that undermines the dominant form. Every act of theft and sabotage, every illegitimate expression of the producer's power, eats away the legitimacy of the dominant authorities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”