"... we had warned that capitalism had entered a new stage, the stage of multinational capitalism, which was even more destructive than finance and monopoly capitalism because it threatened our communities and our cities."
"When King flew to Watts on August 15, he discovered to his surprise that few black youth in Watts had even heard of him or his strategy of nonviolence, and that, despite the loss of lives, they were claiming victory because their violence had forced the authorities to acknowledge their existence."
"In order to regain our humanity, he said, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values against the triples of racism, materialism, and militarism."
"The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death. Until the revolutionary forces come to power here, this country will not be safe for the world and revolutionary warfare on an international scale against the United States will remain the wave of the present - unless all of humanity goes up in one big puff."
"It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher humanity instead of the higher standard of living dependent upon empire."
"In their impatience they see the relation between theory and practice as an antagonistic one. What they call 'practice' is activism: 'Enough of this talk, let's do somethin even if it's wrong.' They have no concept of the flow from revolutionary theory to revolutionary practice and then back again to enriched theory through the evaluation of systemic practice."
"Rebellion is a stage in the development of revolution, but it is not revolution. It is an important stage because it represents the 'standing up,' the assertion of their humanity on the part of the oppressed."
"Hence a rebellion begins with the feeling by the oppressed that 'we can change the way things are,' but it usually ends up by saying 'they ought to do this and they ought to do that.' So that while a rebellion generally begins with the rebels believing in their right to determine their own destiny, it usually ends up with the rebels feeling that their destiny is, in fact, determined by others."
"The only justification for a revolution is that it advances the evolution of man/woman."
"We must know what is the principal contradiction before we can decide who is on the right side and who is on the wrong side."
"How should people spend their lives? Is it sufficient to say that capitalism is responsible for the present state of affairs and that we are all its victims? Or is it necessary to develop new conceptions of appropriate social and human relations and then the concrete programs of struggle necessary to realize these conceptions?"
"A revolutionist must absorb and internalize the lives, the passions, and the aspirations of great revolutionary leaders and not just those of the masses."
"More valuable than those who would die for the revolution are those who would give the rest of their lives to it."
"That is why revolutionary politics is not just a way of contemplating reality but changes reality. The revolutionists who build an organization take responsibility for projecting their answers to the masses. This interaction produces new questions which require new answers and so on. When you become convinced that society must make a sharp break with past values and practices, you become revolutionary. But you do not become a revolutionist until you have organized with others in an organization which takes responsibility for this continuing process of answers and questions."
"They have not accepted the responsibility of revolutionary leadership, which is not just to sympathize with the masses over their wrongs or encourage them in their militancy. That is what the liberal does. Revolutionary leadership, as distinct from liberal leadership, has the duty to help the masses understand what their political goals must be if they are going to achieve any fundamental solution to their problems."
"Having acknowledged the historical and theoretical problem, Lenin saw no concrete alternative to setting up the machinery for centralized planning and controls with all the dangers of a bureaucratic apparatus this entailed and which were soon to become a monstrous fact."
"In doing so, he had left open the question as to whether the entire nation, race, or people oppressed by imperialism constituted the equivalent of an oppressed class."
"In every class society, the masses live restricted lives dominated by economic considerations, while politics remains the province of the ruling class or its agents, the politicians."
"In this concept of transformation or remolding of the masses, Mao was drawing on the centuries-old Chinese cultural tradition which, since the time of Confucius, has stressed moral rather than legal force as the foundation for political authority and legitimacy, and conceives goodness in terms of relation between people rather than as a moral quality which an individual can have on his/her own."
"The oppressed are an integral part of the system which oppresses them, unless they break loose from that system. Therefore until they begin to change themselves, i.e., to become self-determining rather than determined, they cannot get rid of oppressive institutions. Moreover, eliminating oppressive institutions only provides the external conditions for the transformation of people; it does not guarantee that people will change. The change in people has to be made by people themselves."
"Nothing is an end in itself except the continuing struggle to advance, to enlarge one's humanity. Freedom is not for the sake of freedom, democracy is not for the sake of democracy, organization is not for the sake of organization. Each of these is only a means to the evolutionary human goal."
"... rapid human development is a product not of rapid economic development, as the Russian leaders claim, but of political struggles."
"New ideas are not just born... they are created by actual living individuals, with a very few pioneering for the great majority... They come from creative, thoughtful individuals, reflecting upon a specific historical reality which they recognize must be changed, and upon what others have done in the past to try to change that reality."
"National liberation must put an end not only to suffering, but to backwardness. It must enable Africans to rejoin the mainstream of human history and human evolution from which they have been excluded by imperialism. The struggle for national liberation must transform the masses from their present passivity and dependence on others. It must develop in them and through them the power, the will, the capacity, and the structures to govern their own accelerated development. The masses must begin to see themselves as making their own history."
"Only in this way would the ideas, the politics, be in command of the weapons, making the combatants armed militants rather than militarists."
"No matter how close may be the similarity between cases and between the identities of our enemy, national liberation and social revolution are not for export. They are - and every day they become more so - the outcome of a local and national elaboration that is more or less influenced by external factors (favorable or not) but essentially determined and influenced by the historical reality of each people, and carried to success by right solutions to the internal contradictions which arise in this reality."
"Every revolution is the effort to resolve the specific contradictions of a particular society, and can therefore only develop by its own dynamic, through a series of struggles, evaluation of struggles, and new projections for struggling along one road rather than another, by actual living individuals who emerge from but who also expand the social experiences and political perspectives of their people."
"Revolutionists in the United States have yet to wrestle with the awesome challenge of uniting these opposites in a society which has been the beneficiary rather than the victim of imperialist exploitation."
"In a revolutionary period when one's friends and family are likely to be engaged in some form of movement activity, a revolutionist cannot develop the confidence necessary for protracted struggle unless he/she is absolutely clear about the philosophical, historical, and social limitations of other proposals for action."
"First, it must define the main contradiction facing the particular society, the main need and the main aspiration of the people, and hence the main task of the revolution. Then it must propagandize and organize the people to recognize this need and carry out this task."
"The American forces possess a great deal of technical know-how but they have absolutely no sense of political know-why. They fight with machines according to machine principles. There is nothing they can do with the people in Southeast Asia - except exterminate them by converting them into body counts or pacify them by removing them into refugee camps. People have to become numbers and objects first before the American forces know how to deal with them."
"Most people spend their whole lifetime just being utilitarian or materialist, preoccupied only with questions of physical survival and comforts. They do only what they have to do in their own self-interest and/or what they are told to do. They accept whatever occurs in society as beyond their control, as being fixed by others."
"For any fundamental reorganization of society to take place, the eyes and hearts of those at the bottom must be opened to a new, more advanced way of human beings living together."
"As a result, the traditional skills of the craftsman were destroyed, as were al relations between people not based on money."
"Revolutionists seek to change reality, to make it better. Therefore, revolutionists not only need the revolutionary philosophy of dialectics. They need a revolutionary ideology, i.e., a body of ideas based on analyzing the main contradiction of the particular society which they are trying to change, projecting a vision of higher form of reality in which this contradiction would be resolved, and relating this resolution to a social force or forces responsible for and capable of achieving it... Every revolutionist must be absolutely clear about this sequence - from revolutionary philosophy, to revolutionary ideology, to revolutionary politics."
"There still remained the much more difficult and protracted task of creating the new positive of a new social system. Such a social system would be superior to capitalism only if it involved the great masses of the people in continuing, creative, cooperative, self-critical, and self-disciplined practical and productive activity, only if the people themselves were transformed so that they would naturally and unhesitatingly assume responsibility for decision-making and control over the economic and political development of the country."
"... if the masses have not begun to develop a sense of social responsibility before the seizure of power, the new revolutionary government will, sooner rather than later, find itself confronting disappointed and hostile masses who expect miracles from the new government, and are much less patient with it than they were with the gods."
"This new stage of capitalism had not only made it possible for the capitalists to corrupt a substantial section of the working class inside the advanced countries; it had also created a new revolutionary social force inside the systematically undeveloped countries which would be striving for national liberation."
"The revolution to be made in the United States is not to increase the freedom of individual choice. Rather it is to increase the collective consciousness of how to choose, how to grasp both ends in order to pull forward the middle... The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease, and early death."
"Thus the United States became the only nation in history whose best and brightest minds first led a revolution from colonialism in the name of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all men, and then built a contradiction into their society by explicitly denying human dignity to a quarter of the population they aspired to govern."
"Thus 'that's the law' has become the excuse to evade the contradictions, just as economics has become the excuse to evade social and political issues. Courts, lawyers, prisons, guards, and probation officers proliferate to service the proliferating prisoners produced by the proliferating laws."
"... the United States is now ruled by a Warfare-Welfare State, a state which aims both to satisfy the expanding economic appetites of an increasingly self-interested population and to achieve domination over other powers and other peoples."
"From the very beginning, this nation, and every citizen within it, has been confronted with never-ending choices between economic interests and social justice. Periodically this contradiction has been written into law and deepened by a particular decision, as when the Founding Fathers decided to delete from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence the section condemning slavery and the slave trade."
"At this point, following or staging this scenario is both a farce and a tragedy because of the democratic illusions which it fosters and to sponsor blacks who are victims of U.S. racism, to make political capital of their martyrdom, and then to export them back to the black community as its leaders."
"Today, because of the inseparable development of capitalism and racism, the main contradiction in the United States is the contradiction between its advanced technology and its political backwardness. We are a people who have been psychologically and morally damaged by the unlimited opportunities to pursue material happiness provided by the cancerous growth of the productive forces. As a result, the pursuit of happiness for most Americans means the rejection of the pain of responsibility and learning which is inseparable from human growth. Liberty has turned into license. Equality has become the homogenization of everybody at the lowest common denominator of the faceless anybody. Fraternity has become mass-man cheering and groaning at the various modern spectacles - sports, lotteries, and television give-aways."
"In an advanced country a fundamental distinction has to be made between wants and needs, and people must be brought to understand the necessity to choose between them."
"For example, we will have to discover how to give up or to deny ourselves a lot of things before we can become related to nature again."
"Everyone who rejects society doesn't thereby become revolutionary. Some of these rejecters turn to banditry, thuggery, and some just plain cop-out. For example, what was the objective of the mass assembly of five hundred thousand people at Woodstock? Were they advancing humanity or was it just mass self-indulgence?"
"The point is that when you have a serious idea of where you are going, the number of people that you can hope to recruit either as cadre members or as supporters is very much greater than most potential revolutionaries believe."
"At the other pole, those who have adjusted successfully to the society have done so only because they have accepted the dominant philosophy of our society, that one should strive to get as much for oneself as one can, regardless of anyone else, and that one's life should be organized around that purpose. Go to school so that you can get a better job and earn more. Cater to those in the upper echelons because they may be able to help you get a better job. Go on strike so that you can make more money - no matter what you are producing or what it means to the community. According to this philosophy, government exists only to secure everybody the opportunity to live this way, and the best government is that which provides the most effective umbrella for this kind of life."
"These problems cannot be solved by technology, any more than the war in Indochina could be won by technology. In fact, the application of technology to human relations only introduces more distance into these relations and encourages people to treat each other like things. Human relations can only be changed by human beings who have brought about a fundamental change in the view they have of themselves and of other human beings."
"By what concept of politics have the American people guided themselves that they could accept such a childlike, such a diminished human role for themselves all these years? What is politics? What is the appropriate relation between ethics and politics? What is a nation? What is freedom? What is equality? What is truth? And what is the purpose of a constitution? The answers to these questions cannot be found in any dictionary. They have to be created."
"Politics involves citizenship, the responsibility to a particular polity, the creating of governing structures, of plans, of laws, of leadership - whereas ethics deals with one's social relations with friends, family, and associates, irrespective of citizenship. People have engaged in politics and had no ethics; ethical people have not engaged in politics."
"What does unite Americans or what could unite Americans? We must discover a new basis for American nationhood, one that has nothing to do with who came over on the Mayflower."
"However, what the Western individual usually means by freedom is not a particular political movement - from some particular relationship to another relationship. Few people talk about freedom in terms of the freedom to move and to act with people in a certain relationship. They usually talk about freedom as being able to do what they please - the freedom of the individual. They are dissociating the individual from any necessity, from any relatedness, because to the Western individual any relatedness is a kind of restriction. That sense of individual freedom, precisely because it was once such an advanced idea and had so much scope or expression in the United States, has haunted us all. The liberation groups are permeated by it because they are all heirs to this tradition. Today we must supplant this concept of abstract freedom with another concept of freedom that is based upon relation to nature, to other people in society and in the world, to the past and to the future; one based on inter-relationships which are now necessarily a part of our reality, rather than on the illusion of isolated, internal freedom."
"The concept that all truths which deal with human identity are relative and not absolute is indispensable to the revolutionist. In order to make a revolution, you have to discard the notion that anything one has previously regarded as truth about human beings is necessarily true. It is hard to persuade most radicals of this... We tend to speak of ideas as 'only relative' or 'merely relative' implying that what is relative doesn't matter too much because it is not fixed, as if only fixed truths were important."
"We have to reveal people to themselves - and also to discover the people who are different, who are not determined by their conditions, who are resolved not to be shaped by them."
"At this stage the American revolution consists of discovering what American man/woman wants, now that he/she can have the material things. Only then can we tackle the question of how to achieve it. Our job now is to discover what it is that we want beyond the material. What do we want in our relations with ourselves? How do we conceive our human dignity? What do we want in our relations with each other? IT is something beyond the material, but what is it? Now that we can have the material, and know that it isn't enough, what is it that we want? This question is what bothers Americans most; even race relations are an aspect of it. How does American man/woman want to live tomorrow? It doesn't have to have anything to do with how we lived yesterday."
"Unless there is a revolution in the United States, the United States isn't safe for the world. But the Indochinese can't make the United States revolution. Americans have to make it. In that sense the revolutionary struggle in the United States takes priority over all other struggles."
"Today the huge scale of operations, the destructiveness and wastefulness of so much that is produced, all make it difficult to see one's activity as part of a meaningful whole."
"Positions are a means whereby we get an individual to confront him/herself, to begin to define his/her humanity; whereby we force a person, through ideas, to act rather than just to complain. We take a position in order to force a person to take a position, and thereby to take some responsibility for his/her positions. In other words, we establish a framework within which he/she can grapple with him/herself."
"Many people want to shift the blame for our shame to the military-industrial complex. But the greed of the American people for material goods far in excess of what they need is what has provided the energy, the fuel, for the military-industrial complex. The apparatus is the external cause. The greed of the American people is the internal cause. It is this internal cause which each has to examine and replace with another more human identity."
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