Communists from the United States

"When God is Socialism, God is love. [...] Socialism means that all the means of production that man has [...] are owned by the same people, the family of man, the family of God. There is only one source of ownership—love. No one can privately own the land. No one can privately own the air. It must be held in common. So then, that is love, that is God, Socialism"

"I have seen by divine revelation the total annihilation of this country and many other parts of the world. San Francisco will be flattened. The only survivors will be those people who are hidden in the cave that I have been shown in a vision. Those who go into this cave with me will be saved from the poisonous radioactive fallout that will follow the nuclear bomb attack. [...] It will be up to our group to begin life anew on this continent. Then we will begin a truly ideal society just as you see it here in this room today. People will care about one another. Elderly people will be made to feel needed and will be allowed to be productive. People's needs will be met because they are loved, and not because they have money.This church family is an example of what society will eventually be like all over the world. There will at last be peace on earth. I have seen this all by divine revelation."

"Our government does not love its people."

"You've seen three people drop dead and you saw them resurrected. Their attitudes were prejudiced and they would drop dead, but I resurrected them. And I've done it sixty-three times in eleven months this year in a public meeting."

"For twenty-four times this year people up to ninety-six years of age have fell down, and they've gived up the ghost, and no God came out of the sky. Old nigger Jones just walked down, and said, "Arise! Arise! Take up your bed! Arise!""

"My whole life I have suffered from poverty and have faced many disappointments and pain, like a man is used to. That is why I want to make other people happy and want them to feel at home."

"The young preacher once threw his Bible to the floor and yelled at his associates, "Too many people are looking at this instead of looking at me!""

"If you're born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you're born in sin. But if you're born in socialism, you're not born in sin."

""Love is the only weapon." Shit! Bullshit! Martin Luther King died with love! Kennedy died talking about something he couldn't even understand, some kind of generalized love, and he never even backed it up. He was shot down. Bullshit! "Love is the only weapon with which I've got to fight." I've got a hell of a lot of weapons to fight! I've got my claws. I've got cutlasses. I've got guns. I've got dynamite. I've got a hell of a lot to fight! I'll fight! I'll fight!"

"Son of a bitchin’ no good lousy ass anarchistic capitalist bitch. That's what I say about my relatives, but you won't say it."

"I was ready to kill by the end of the third grade. I mean, I was so aggressive and hostile, I was ready to kill. Nobody gave me love, any understanding. In those days a parent was supposed to go with a child to school functions. There was some kind of school performance, and everybody's parent was there but mine. I'm standing there, alone. Always was alone."

"If my wife said, I'm not going to be a communist, I'd say, well, forget it, by God, I'll forget you too."

"I have failed [...] I live for my people because they need me. But whenever they leave, they tell lies about the place."

"I'd like to choose my own kind of death, for a change. I'm tired of being tormented to hell. Tired of it."

"So my opinion is that you be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide; it’s a revolutionary act. We can’t go back; they won’t leave us alone. They’re mow going back to tell more lies, which means more congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can survive."

"If we can't live in peace, then let's die in peace."

"Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. We didn't commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world."

"Are we black, proud, and socialist, or what are we?"

"I have known Rev. Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple for ten years. During this time I have never known him once to refuse to help anyone in need, regardless of race, color or creed. He has always believed in lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness, and his work here in San Francisco and the Bay Area, as well as his devotion to the people and mission in Guyana, are the mark of a man who has dedicated his whole life to the service and welfare of humankind."

"Jim Jones was a self-obsessed American cult leader who manipulated the poor and vulnerable, demanded their complete obedience, and ordered the murder of those who questioned his integrity. At the end he killed or convinced nearly a thousand people — including two hundred children — to take their own lives in a jungle settlement in South America called ‘Jonestown’, constructed around his own warped and paranoid fantasy."

"Jones began life as a pious man with a social conscience, who refused to judge people on grounds of wealth or race. But his vision of a socialist utopia was ultimately indistinguishable from his own manic desire for domination — and when that control was threatened, he was prepared to bring destruction down on all those around him."

"A paranoid narcissist. Jim Jones was enthralling, persuasive and power-hungry. He thrived on attention, adoration and adulation. He was equal parts bully and charmer."

"We were about to board the planes for the flight back to the United States. Jim Jones didn't want us to leave, at least not alive. A tractor trailer loaded with men armed with shotguns and rifles pulled up and opened fire on us at that airstrip. Congressman Ryan was gunned down, having been shot 40 times. The first and only congressman in the history of this country to be assassinated during the line of duty. I was shot five times and left to bleed on that airstrip for 22 hours. Back at Jonestown, over 900 people lost their lives in a mass murder and suicide that night. This is what I awoke to on that long day. I was 28 years old, and I was waiting to die. I laid awake all night fearing some of the gunmen would come back and finish us off. Time passed, and local Guyanese people offered me rum to try and get me through the night. I had a lot of time to think. I promised God that if I lived, I would make every day count. I promised that I would make something out of my life if I was allowed to keep my life. Well, here I am. I have chosen a career as a public servant. One, I hope many of you will contemplate as you move forward in your lives."

"Constructing or adopting a belief system in which one is either God's prophet or God himself inflates the ego to monstrous proportions. Koresh was more deeply concerned with religion, Jim Jones with racial equality and an egalitarian society. But both compensated for isolation and lack of love in childhood by becoming infatuated with power, and both ended up with delusions of their own divinity."

"The Wizard of Oz (M. G. M.) should settle an old Hollywood controversy: whether fantasy can be presented on the screen as successfully with human actors as with cartoons. ("The New Pictures," August 21, 1939)"

"All children are afraid of the night; when they grow up, they are still afraid, but more afraid of admitting it. ("Night Thoughts," May 8, 1939)"

"When the train of history makes a sharp turn, said Lenin, the passengers who do not have a good grip on their seats are thrown off. Last week the Communist Limited had just about completed the dizzy turn from the Communazi Pact to the Battle of Britain, and U. S. literary liberals were spattered all over the right of way. ("Revolt of the Intellectuals," January 6, 1941)"

"The book begins with the clang of a cell door closing in a GPU prison. It ends with a shot in the back of the head in a murky passageway of the prison cellar. It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet. ("Brightest in Dungeons," May 26, 1941)"

""What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!" ("The Ghosts on the Roof," March 5, 1945)"

"Once upon a time, when the Yewnited States was just a little shaver among the nations, but already very spoiled along the literate Eastern fringes, there lived younder in Tennessee a lovable old man with a tongue like a rat-tailed file and a face so hard they called him Old Hickory. ("The Old Deal," October 22, 1945)"

"Toscanini was hailing a great artist, but that voice was more than a magnificent personal talent. It was the religious voice of a whole religious people — probably the most God-obsessed (and man-despised) people since the ancient Hebrews. ("In Egypt Land," December 30, 1946)"

"In the 20th Century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas. ("The Circles of Perdition," December 8, 1947)"

"Reinhold Niebuhr's new orthodoxy is the oldtime religion put through the intellectual wringer. It is a re-examination of orthodoxy for an age dominated by such trends as rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, fascism, idealism and the idea of progress."

"Two faiths were on trial . Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies... At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. (p. 4)"

"Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. (pp. 4-5)"

"A man is not primarily a witness against something. (p. 5)"

"The last war simplified the balance of political forces in the world by reducing them to two . For the first time, it made the power of the Communist sector of mankind (embodied in the Soviet Union) roughly equal to the power of the free sector of mankind (embodied in the United States). It made the collision of these powers all but inevitable. For the world wars did not end the crisis. They raised its tensions to a new pitch. They raised the crisis to a new stage. All the politics of our time, including the politics of war, will be the politics of this crisis. (p. 7)"

"My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design." (p. 16)"

"In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men. (p. 25)"

"I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: "You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world." (p. 25)"

"He was a Southerner with the fine abandon some Southerners have about firearms and related matters. "Well, sir," he said with immense pleasure, "you've bought the right gun. Just hold it in front of you, squeeze the trigger, and, brother, it will be fay-ya-you-well." (p. 58)"

"[Stalin's] purge caused me to examine the meaning of Communism.... I had always known of course that there were books critical of Communism.... I had never read them because I knew that the party did not want me to read them..... the first book I read... was called I Speak for the Silent [by] Professor Vladimir Tchernavin.... He was a little man in the Communist world, gentle, humane, good.... Suddenly for no reason at all he was arrested and carried away by the secret police.... Now for the first time, I believed that slave labor camps existed.... I said ‘this is evil, absolute evil. Of this evil I am a part.’ ... If Communism were evil, what was left but moral chaos? .... The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind – the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul.... (pp. 79-83)"

"Then he asked in German (the only language that we ever spoke): "Ist die Sowjetregierung eine faschistische Regierung? - Is the Soviet Government a fascist government?"… I sat silent for some moments. Then I said: "Ja, die Sowjetregierung ist eine faschistische Regierung - the Soviet Government is a fascist government"… Krivitsky turned for the first time and looked at me directly. "Du hast recht," he said, "und Kronstadt war der Wendepunkt - You are right, and Kronstadt was the turning point." (pp. 459-460)"

"Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that time: "I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism." (p. 25)"

"I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure because it is necessary. (p. 456)"

"No one mentioned Communism or the Hiss Case until we sat over our coffee in the living room. Mrs. Philip Jessup had just used her personal good offices to try to get me off TIME. Luce was baffled by the implacable clamor of the most enlightened people against me. "By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave," he said, "the upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?" "You don't understand the class structure of American society," said Smetana, "or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists." (p.616)"

""The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives or revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise." (pp. 694-695) (televised testimony of August 25, 1948)"

"The Hiss Case has turned my wife and me into old people - not a disagreeable condition. But we who used to plan in terms of decades, now find a year, two years, the utmost span of time we can take in. (p. 798)"

"A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory. (p. 40)"

"The Columbia faculty was not, of course, composed wholly of young skeptics and esthetes. By any count of academic noses, they were a small minority. (p. 119)"

"Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian. (p. 186)"

"Die goldene Medina. The accent was not on the golden (except in the sense of some mysterious Light), but on the Medina - that is, the city of hope, the city of deliverance. (p. 281)"

"The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself. (p. 315)"

"It is in fact no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder that will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come. (p. 52)"

"Now, the Communists recognized at once (or, more probably, after they had stirred things up a bit) that Senator McCarthy is a political godsend. (p. 57)"

"Conservatism is alien to the very nature of capitalism. (p. 229)"

"With the exception of Granville Hicks, probably none of these people was a Communist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fight fascism. How should they know the Lenin was the first fascist and that they were cooperating with the party from which the Nazis had borrowed all their important methods and ideas?... After Stalin’s Purge, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Russia’s grab of half of Poland, the 1940 betrayed the full nature of Stalin’s hand with the attack on Finland, the seizure of part of Rumanian, and all of the Baltic States. Fellow travelers began to jump off the train. The Revolt of the Intellectuals., Time (p. 61)"

"Meanwhile the intellectuals, refugees once more in their lonely remodeled farmhouses in Connecticut and the Berkshires, thought it over. Comrade Hicks, who had been closest to the Party, knew most about it, thought Communism was daily growing more like fascism. (p. 61)"

"A state is as sound as its thriftiest citizens. A social order is sick when it has to tax its thrifty citizen to provide for its poor. When a social order has no other choice but to so, that social order is doomed. The Anatomy of Fascism, The American Mercury, April 1944 (p. 94)"

"Fascism began with the first trade union and the first cartel… Meanwhile, the Left developed its own form of cartelization—syndicalism, chiefly under the theoretical inspiration of the French engineer, George Sorel, whose hardboiled Reflections on Violence was so much appealing to our youth than the ponderosities of Das Kapital. For Sorel not only had the knife between his teeth; he accepted the more sweeping Marxist ideas too—class war, seizure of the instruments of production by the workers, the expropriation of anybody who owns anything. (p. 95)"

"Lenin was a Great Russian peasant et rien de plus, mais r-r-rien de plus. Oh yes, he was a dialectician, the only true one among them. But most of all he was a Russian and that is to be a peasant."

"To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms — this is the art of the dancer. It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin has said: "To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature." Rodin is right; and in my art I have by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases, friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand natural source. My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to the whole of nature its beauty and its life."

"I have closely studied the figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters, but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious Dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover movèments, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are discovered."

"Bernard Shaw says that as long as men torture and slay animals and eat their flesh we shall have war. I think all sane, thinking people must be of his opinion. The children of my school were all vegetarians, and grew strong and beautiful on a vegetable and fruit diet. Sometimes during the war when I heard the cries of the wounded I thought of the cries of the animals in the slaughterhouse, and I felt that, as we torture these poor defenceless creatures, so the gods torture us. Who loves this horrible thing called war? Probably the meat-eaters, having killed, feel the need to kill—kill birds, animals—the tender stricken deer—hunt foxes. The butcher with his bloody apron incites bloodshed, murder. Why not? From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions on the earth?"

"I could have played the part of Saint Joan. I ought to have played it. I have the ample figure, the hardy physique of a farm-servant. Joan was a buxom creature. Yet she is always played by thin little actresses."

"Love is not the sacred thing that poets talk about … Love is an illusion; it is the world's greatest mistake. I ought to know for I've been loved as no other woman of my time has been loved. Men have threatened suicide, they have taken poison, they have fought duels for me. All kinds have come to me — geniuses, poets, millionaires, artists, musicians — but now there is not one to whom I have appealed for the loan of £25 who have responded. There is love for you!"

"I could not adopt him so I married him. You know how wonderful he is, like all Russians. He starts reciting verse at two o'clock in the morning."

"The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement of the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body."

"And here I want to avoid a misunderstanding that might easily arise. From what I have said you might conclude that my intention is to return to the dances of the old Greeks, or that I think that the dance of the future will be a revival of the antique dances or even of those of the primitive tribes. No, the dance of the future will be a new movement, a consequence of the entire evolution which mankind has passed through. To return to the dances of the Greeks would be as impossible as it is unnecessary. We are not Greeks and therefore cannot dance Greek dances."

"But the dance of the future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, is mere merchandise."

"The harmony of music exists equally with the harmony of movement in nature. Man has not invented the harmony of music. It is one of the underlying principles of life. Neither could the harmony of movement be invented: it is essential to draw one’s conception of it from Nature herself, and to see the rhythm of human movement from the rhythm of water in motion, from the blowing of the winds on the world, in all the earth’s movements, in the motions of animals, fish, birds, reptiles, and even in primitive man, whose body still moved in harmony with nature…..All the movements of the earth follow the lines of wave motion. Both sound and light travel in waves. The motion of water, winds, trees and plants progresses in waves. The flight of a bird and the movements of all animals follow lines like undulating waves. If then one seeks a point of physical beginning for the movement of the human body, there is a clue in the undulating motion of the wave."

"Isadora Duncan's arms were not clichéd ketchup buddhas like those we're used to seein' in Hollywood & Co., but real floral contaminations, devils in the raw whose blood had sublimely turned to nitroglycerin, or some other "secret" substance even more deadly & dangerous than fire & poison, at the exact moment she discovered the dance."

"All my muses in the theatre are movements seized during Isadora's flight; she was my principal source."

"I shall never forget the first time I saw her come on to an empty platform to dance. … She came through some little curtains which were not much taller than herself — she came through and walked down to where a musician, his back to us, was seated at a large piano — he had just finished playing a short prelude by Chopin when in she came, and in some five or six steps was standing at the piano, quite still — you might have counted five or eight, and then there sounded the voice of Chopin in a second prelude or etude — it was played through gently and came to an end — she had not moved at all. Then one step back or sideways, and the music began again as she went moving on before, or after it. Only just moving — not pirouetting or doing any of the things which a Taglioni or a Fanny Elssler would have certainly done. She was speaking her own language, not echoing any ballet master, and so she came to move as no one had ever seen anyone move before. The dance ended, she again stood quite still. No bowing, no smiling — nothing at all. Then again the music is off, and she runs from it — it runs after her — for she has gone ahead of it. How is it that we know she is speaking her own language? We know it, for we see her head, her hands, gently active, as are her feet, her whole person. And if she is speaking, what is it she is saying? No one would ever be able to report truly, yet no one present had a moment's doubt. Only this can we say — that she was telling to the air the very things we long to hear; and now we heard them, and this sent us all into an unusual state of joy, and I sat still and speechless."

"I have the right to choose the father of my own children," she declared, and then wrote to George Bernard Shaw: "Will you be the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world," but he replied: "I must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains."

"It was never easy to coax Isadora Duncan into a photographer's studio. Like a wild and wise animal, she fled from those who sought to capture the essence of her — which was motion — by making her stand still."

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"This great artist is no longer in our world. The sun has set: the cycle is finished. In her art and in her life Isadora Duncan seemed to be an incarnation of all the energies of Nature."

""Come away! Her dancing says. Come out into the splendid perilous world! Come up on the mountain-top where the great wind blows! Learn to be young always! Learn to be incessantly renewed! Learn to live in the intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture! Say farewell to the world you know and join the passionate spirits of the world’s history! Storm through into your dreams! Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never look back, and never regret! You shall become sweet and mad as a lover …"

"In those moments where beauty and emotion fuse and climax, something of the immortal floats about the dancer; she wanders in a divine ray, in a mist where all works of art circle in unison with her."

"Perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted herself to developing the art of the dance … Her interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the people — that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the street — offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art."

"Isadora Duncan has not dealt with the dance intellectually, nor spiritually — but personally. The Age saw to that!"

"Her dances were hymns to freedom — of sensibility, of passion, of the transcendentally convinced and convincing Emersonian soul … Today it is hard to picture convincing interpretations of Joy, Hope, Immortality, the Soul. But at the turn of the century an American girl, incarnating these and more, coincided with historical promise."

"The revival of the dance is significant of the abiding, though much forgotten, need of the world for its arts, and a proof of the strange immortality of the arts themselves. A few years ago several great dancers came to summon the world, who must have prepared through long periods separately and without a common plan; yet with the effectiveness of premeditated simultaneity they appeared, as it were in a company. And the response of a world still hungering, somewhat dimly, for the arts, was the welcome we give to an advent long desired. Fortunate were those whose introduction to this momentous movement came by way of the greatest of its exponents, Isadora Duncan. It was one of the great hours, of which we have but three or four in a lifetime, when we first saw her. In that hour we sensed the manifold meanings and implications of the dance; its ecstasies, inspirations, and healing beneficences, and its possibly unimaginable importance to the modern world."

"The dancing of Isadora Duncan is great symbolic art; now, when perhaps we have seen it for the last time, we must unhesitatingly re-affirm our conviction that it is one of the superlative artistic expressions of eternal spiritual glories. Her endowment is no mere talent for the consummation of exterior beauties; it is genius. She is a seer and a prophet, fulfilled of understanding and wisdom. The deep disease of the soul, its wasting, anemic illness since it ate of the weeds of prudery and went wandering on the hard roads of materialism, is known to her, and she has a great pity; and with devoted effort, through consecrating trials of toil and rejection, she has fitted herself to be a physician of the spirit. She brings us pure wine from an ancient vineyard, and she will not mingle with it any sharp strange bitters to sting our jaded taste. In her manner is nothing either of decadence nor of gigantic, splendid but agonising dramaturgy. She is of the company of those who have held to the slender infragible thread of the eternal tradition of beauty. And coming so, she startles our spiritual memories from a sleep of centuries. What glorious things she makes the soul remember! Once we were young, and the leaping blades of our desire striking the granite facts of life lit lively fires of wonder. We were simple, so that when the moving beauty of nature and the joy of each other's company stirred us to ecstasies, we sought free and natural expression; we danced — we danced as the movements of waves and branches, and as the exquisite beauties of our own bodies suggested. Such memories she evokes by her subtle gestures and movements, which are as the dancing of a leaf over the ground, as the drifting of mist over the still surface of a lake at dawn. The morning of time dawns upon our spirits again, and once more we have a sense that hears the gods. Watching her we see the soul of man moving in the dance of destiny; dreaming, hoping, aspiring, questioning; thrilling with desire and joy and melancholy, crushed, purged and raised again; the spirit of man enduring its trials and triumphing in the great adventure. This is the interpretation of life by the intuitive wisdom of genius, which is feeling confirmed by thought, and which understands that the ultimate of human apprehension is a mysticism impossible of interpretation save in symbolic art."

"Here was a great woman; a magnificent, generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman. There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible, slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead, where there were no paths."

"When she read my first book Visions and Revisions, she sent me so many red roses that they filled the little flat, but I was too nervous to go and see her. She has been one of the most thrilling sensations — but that is a wretched word to express it — of my whole existence. She has danced for me alone — with a beauty that makes the most beautiful young girls' dancing seem mere child's play. It was as though Demeter herself, the mater dolorosa of the ancient earth, rose and danced. Well, she has gone — and I enclose to you the red rose she gave to me as she went."

"She suggested that the sculptor might probe the Greek spirit by studying modern dance. Antoine Bourdelle agreed. Capturing Duncan's appeal for a generation of sculptors, he likened the dancer to an "antique marble throbbing with eternity," who infused with life a classical sporty all but snuffed out by stale academicism."

"She was a flame sheath of flesh made for dancing. She believed she ran into storm, rain, sun and became part of them and they were afterward woven in her dances."

"The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am. Roses, lovers, money, children, came to her in her life dance from California to Russia. When her dancing days were not yet over but almost come to an end, she died in a swift ride with a flame red scarf enwrapping her neck tighter and tighter."

"Isadora Duncan! … I feel that she dances a symbol of human, animal happiness as it should be, free from the unnatural trammels. Her great big thighs, her small head, her full solid loins, belly — clean, all clean — she dances away civilization's tainted brain vapors, wholly human and holy — part of God."

"Poetry personified. She is not the Tenth Muse but all Nine Muses in one — and painting and sculpture as well."

"Whenever you feel the evil influence of the middle class muddling your soul, you'll say these two words and you'll be a free spirit again: "Isadora Duncan.""

"Nor must we forget the liberating force which sprang from the art of Isadora Duncan, whose heroic practice has done more than any precepts of philosophy to widen our ideas as to the intellectual and spiritual possibilities of the dance."

"If you ever think about me, and if you ain’t gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me. I don’t want myself on your mind, if you’re not gonna work for the people. Like we always said, if you’re asked to make a commitment at the age of twenty and you say I don’t want to make that commitment only because of the simple reason that I’m too young to die, I wanna live a little bit longer—what you did is, you’re dead already."

"You have to understand that people have to pay the price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not to struggle then god damn it, you don’t deserve to win. Let me say peace to you, if you’re willing to fight for it."

"Why don’t you live for the people. Why don’t you struggle for the people. Why don’t you die for the people."

"So we say—we always say in the that they can do anything they want to to us. We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat, I am the people. I am not the pigs. You’ve got to make a distinction. And the people are going to have to attack the pigs. The people are going to have to stand up against the pigs. That’s what the Panthers are doing here. That’s what the Panthers are doing all over the world."

"is going through all types of physical and mental torture. But that’s alright, because we said even before this happened, and we’re going to say it after this and after I’m locked up and after everybody’s locked up, that you can jail revolutionaries, but you can’t jail the revolution. You might run a liberator like Eldridge Cleaver out of the country, but you can’t run liberation out of the country. You might murder a like , but you can’t murder freedom fighting, and if you do, you’ll come up with answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain, you’ll come up with conclusions that don’t conclude, and you’ll come up with people that you thought should be acting like pigs that’s acting like people and moving on pigs. And that’s what we’ve got to do. So we’re going to see about Bobby regardless of what these people think we should do, because school is not important and work is not important. Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all."

"We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with , but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’ve stood up and said we’re not going to fight pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution."

"Papa Doc in Haiti hated everything white. Man, you couldn't put this white paper in front of Papa Doc's face. But, he moved all the white people out and he took over the oppression, he did. Because, no education. If the people had been educated, they'd have said we don't hate the muthafuckin' white people, we hate the oppressor, whether he be white, black, brown or yellow."

"There has to be an educational program - that's very important. As a matter of fact, it is so important to us that a person has to go through six weeks of our political education before he can consider himself a member of the party, able to even [run our] ideology for the party. Why? Because if they don't have an education, then, they're nowhere. You dig what I'm sayin'? They're nowhere; because they don't even know why they doin' what they doin'. You might get people caught up in the emotions of the movement. You understand me? You might get them caught up because they're poor and they want something. And then if he's not educated, they'll want more and before you know it, they'll be capitalist and before you know it we'll have negro imperialism."

"This system wants Fred Hampton’s tale to remain untold, his militant memory to fade, his life of service to black folks and the black revolutionary struggle to pass unknown. The media has covered up this recent history, but some remember; perhaps now you will too."

"The execution of Fred Hampton was the gravest domestic crime of the Nixon administration."

"Hampton was instrumental in forming links between the Panthers and organisations of working class Chinese people, whites, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in what he dubbed the Rainbow Coalition."

"In fact, the drive against the Communists is aimed, above all, against the labor movement."

"Whether one agrees with the Communist Party or not, one must at least know the truth about it. One must not permit his ideas to be shaped by the hysteria which now passes as a "crusade against Communism." ... For example, the canard that every Communist has his pockets lined with "Moscow gold." If that were true, one could be sure that there would scarcely be any room in our party for workers. The capitalists, to whom gold is god of the universe, would crowd them out."

"As a Negro American, I want to be free. I want equal opportunities, equal rights; I want to be accorded the same dignity as a human being and the same status as a citizen as any other American. This is my constitutional right. I want first-class, unconditional citizenship. I want it, and am entitled to it, now."

"I became a member of the Party in January, 1933, in the heat of battle. At the time, I was serving as defense attorney for Angelo Herndon in Atlanta, Georgia, where Herndon, an eighteen-year-old Negro youth, had been framed on a charge of inciting to insurrection. ... Of what was Herndon "guilty"? He had led a demonstration of unemployed Negro and white workers to City Hall, had been found with a couple of Communist pamphlets in his possession, and possessed a firm and inspiringly defiant advocacy of the freedom of Negroes and of the liberation of the white masses from exploitation. The "dangerous" policy he then espoused as a Communist, was the unity of the Negroes in the South with the impoverished white workers and poor farmers."

"Who is loyal to America and its democratic traditions? James Byrnes: governor of South Carolina, who equates the role of the NAACP and KKK, correctly assailed by Thurgood Marshall as "fascist McCarthyism rampant with racism"? Or Ben Davis - whose eloquent voice against Jim Crow scathes Byrnes and all the racists even from behind prison bars? Yes, To Believe In Negro Freedom Means To Be Radical!"

"Demands Ben Davis fought for, bans on biased textbooks and the lifting of bans on such books as authored by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Howard Fast and other outstanding writers; whose writings are feared. Davis urged restoration of progressive teachers to their posts and the exclusion of biased white supremacist and anti-Semitic instructors in our schools;"

"There is this... that must be admired about DuBois, Robeson, Ben Davis and others. They are not taking it lying down. Ben Davis is in prison... Robeson has sacrificed... DuBois has fought without let up for over half a century and at 85 be is determined as ever. Some day when truth gets a hearing, America, regardless of colour, we will honour them."

"America, which idealizes the rights of the individual above everything else, is in reality, a nation dominated by the social power of groups, classes, in-groups and cliques—both ethnic and religious. The individual in America has few rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another. Hence, the individual Negro has, proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has very little political, economic or social power (beyond moral grounds) to wield. Thus it can be seen that those Negroes, and there are very many of them, who have accepted the full essence of the Great American Ideal of individualism are in serious trouble trying to function in America."

"We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him."

"We sometimes come to God, not because we love him best, but because we love our possessions best; we ask Christ to "save Western civilization," without asking ourselves whether it is entirely a civilization that Christ could want to save. We pray, too often, not to do God's will, but to enlist God's assistance in maintaining our "continually increasing consumption." And yet, though Christ promised that God would feed us, he never promised that God would stuff us to bursting."

"She is incredibly articulate. She means what she says and she says what she means. Her metaphors are what make her poetry, and they ring true."

"And so, from the standpoint of Marxism, the Russian experiments in planned economy are not to be rated as socialistic. The Russian practice is not directed according to communist principles, but follows the laws of capitalist accumulation. We have here, even though in modified form, a surplus-value production under the ideological camouflage of ‘socialist construction’. The wage relation is identical with that of capitalist production, forming also in Russia the basis for the existence of a growing bureaucracy with mounting privileges; a bureaucracy which, by the side of the private capitalist elements which are still present, is strictly to be apprised as a new class appropriating to itself surplus labor and surplus value. From the Russian experience no positive conclusions can be drawn which have a relation to communist production and distribution. It still offers only examples of the way in which communism cannot be developed."

"Frequently Lenin identified state capitalism and socialism... In Towards the Seizure of Power, he writes: “Socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people; by this token it ceases to be capitalist monopoly.”"

"While the capitalist mode of production grew up historically on the basis of individual ownership of the means of production, the Russian revolution has shown that under certain conditions the capitalist mode of production can continue to exist even though the individual proprietors are eliminated and replaced by a collective exploiting apparatus where factories are not owned by capitalist ‘X’ or ‘Y’ but are ‘controlled’ (i. e. owned) by the State (i. e. the controlling classes)."

"The solution, according to Trotsky, lies in the replacement of the present parasitical bureaucracy by a non-parasitical apparatus. Nothing else in his opinion needs to be changed as the Soviet economic system is fully qualified to proceed toward socialism in combination with the world-revolutionary trend. This new bureaucracy, essential in Trotsky’s transitional stage, will, according to Trotsky, introduce a greater equality of income. But Trotsky must remember that the present bureaucracy started out with the same idea, originally limiting salaries to Communists, etc. It was the circumstances enveloping the economy which not only enabled but obliged the present bureaucracy to adopt a program of ever increasing economic inequality in its favor."

"Russian state capitalism has become the example for other nations as indicated in the rise of fascism and the growth of governmental control in all countries. However, this trend is no sign of ‘progress,’ as many people believe. It does not correspond to a ‘higher stage’ of capitalism, but indicates the decline of world capitalism. The trend toward bolshevization and fascization is only the political expression of the stagnation and decline of the capitalist system; it is barbarism."

"Certainly, the Russian state-capitalism, in which class relations are continued, cannot employ the Marxian science, for this science consists of nothing but the critique of those selfsame capitalistic conditions, which characterize Russia and every other capitalistic country. For the purpose of justifying the exploitation of the workers, the inequalities of income, and the accumulation of capital that exists there, the Marxian economic theories are certainly useless."

"In Russia, as elsewhere, the means of production are not controlled by the workers but are the monopoly of a special group in society. In the relations of the workers to the means of production, no difference exists between a private property society and a state-capitalist system. The position of the Russian bureaucracy to its workers is exactly the same as that of the individual entrepreneur to his. The first need of that bureaucracy is to safeguard its own position in order to develop industry and agriculture. Whatever else this bureaucracy may do, it has first of all to ‘plan’ its own security, and then to proceed to ‘plan’ life for the rest of the population. This is recognized not only by the present and supposedly “degenerated” Russian bureaucracy, but was clear also to the ‘founders’ of the Russian state-capitalist system."

"Thus, to mention just a few facts, not the social democracy but Hitler fulfilled the long desire of the socialists, the Anschluss of Austria; not social democracy but fascism established the wished — for state control of industry and banking; not social democracy but Hitler declared the first of May a legal holiday. A careful analysis of what the socialists actually wanted to do and never did, compared with actual policies since 1933, will reveal to any objective observer that Hitler realised no more than the programme of social democracy, but without the socialists."

"Like Hitler, the social democracy and Kautsky were opposed to both bolshevism and communism. Even a complete state-capitalist system as the Russian was rejected by both in favour of mere state control. And what is necessary in order to realise such a programme was not dared by the socialists but undertaken by the fascists. The anti-fascism of Kautsky illustrated no more than the fact that just as he once could not imagine that Marxist theory could be supplemented by a Marxist practice, he later could not see that a capitalist reform policy demanded a capitalist reform practice, which turned out to be the fascist practice… The life of Kautsky can, in all truth and without malicious intent, be summed up in the words: From Marx to Hitler."

"Rather, the war, and even the period preceding the war, will be marked by a general and complete military dictatorship in fascist and anti-fascist countries alike. The war will wipe out the last distinction between the democratic and the anti-democratic nations. And workers will serve Hitler as they served the Kaiser; they will serve Roosevelt as they served Wilson; they will die for Stalin as they died for the Tsar."

"‘People love today to speak disdainfully about the liberalistic economy,’ [Kautsky] wrote in his last work; ‘however, the theories founded by Quesnay, Adam Smith and Ricardo are not at all obsolete. In their essentials Marxhad accepted their theories and developed them further, and he has never denied that the liberal freedom of commodity production constituted the best basis for its development.’"

"In order that some may lead, others must be powerless. To be the vanguard of the workers, the elite has to usurp all social key positions. Like the bourgeoisie of old, the new leaders had to seize and control all means of production and destruction. To hold their control and keep it effective, the leaders must constantly strengthen themselves by bureaucratic expansion, and continually divide the ruled. Only masters can be leaders. Trotsky was such a master."

"Today, great men are no longer necessary. Modern propaganda instruments can transform any fraud into a hero, any mediocre personality into an all-comprehending genius. Propaganda actually transforms through its collective efforts any average, if not stupid, leader, like Hitler and Stalin, into a great man. The leaders become symbols of an organized, collective, and really intelligent will to maintain given social institutions. Outside of Russia, Trotsky was soon reduced to the master of a small sect of professional revolutionists and their providers. He was ‘the Old Man,’ the indisputable authority of an artificial growth upon the political scene, destined to end in absurdity."

"Coming to power with the help of a russified Marxian ideology, Trotsky, after he lost power, had no choice but to maintain the revolutionary ideology in its original form against the degeneration of Marxism indulged in by the Stalinists."

"Leadership remained after Lenin’s death; there was not yet the Leader. Though Trotsky was forced into exile, the unripeness of the authoritarian form of government spared his life for fifteen years. Soon both old and new oppositions to Stalin’s rule could easily be destroyed. Hitler’s overwhelming success in the “night of the long knives,” when he killed off with one bold stroke the whole of the effective opposition against him, showed Stalin the way to handle his own problems… This was done not in the Nibelungen manner in which the German fascists got rid of Roehm, Strasser and their following, but in the hidden, scheming, cynical manner of the Moscow Trials, to exploit even the death of the potential oppositionists for the greater glory of the all-embracing and beloved leader, Stalin. The applause of those taking the offices emptied by the murdered was assured. To make the broad masses happily accept the miserable end of the ‘old Bolsheviks’ was merely a job for the minister of propaganda. Thus the whole of Russia, not only the leading bureaucratic group, finished off the ‘traitors to the fatherland of the workers.’"

"Nevertheless, despite the fact that Stalin murdered Trotsky, despite the displacement of all forms of bolshevism by fascism, a final evaluation of Trotsky’s historical role will have to place him in line with Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler as one of the great leaders of a world-wide movement attempting, knowingly and unknowingly, to prolong the capitalist exploitation system with methods first devised by bolshevism, then completed by German fascism, and finally glorified in the general butchery which we are now experiencing."

"The laissez faire theory was opposed by theories favoring state interventions in the economy."

"Long before the rise of fascism, competitive capitalism was replaced in each capitalist nation by monopoly capitalism. The markets were controlled by trusts and cartels. The development from laissez faire to monopoly capitalism led to the creation of the world market, the international division of labor, the concentration of capital, and the increase of the productivity of labor. They are all interdependent; one is unthinkable without the others."

"There is, however, an apparent contradiction here; for if fascism must be regarded as the direct outcome of the previous capitalist development it should appear first in the oldest and most advanced nations. But this is not the case. Russia, in which we find the most complete totalitarian system, was one of the most backward nations, as was Italy which experienced the first ‘fascist revolution.’"

"So far as this fundamental capitalistic relationship is concerned nothing has changed in the totalitarian systems. What has been altered is the relationship between government and individual capitalists. In the democracies, individual ownership predominates over governmental control; in the fascist states, governmental control over individual ownership. In Russia, alone, individual ownership has been done away with altogether and the state has complete control of the productive apparatus and natural resources. The trends of development indicate that the democracies travel in the direction of fascism and the fascist nations in the direction of the Russian system."

"It is now quite clear that only those in the traditional labour movement who opposed its undemocratic organisations and their tactics can properly be called socialists. The labour leaders of yesterday and today did not and do not represent a workers' movement but only a capitalistic movement of workers."

"To be sure Rühle had no doubt that totalitarianism was worse for the workers than bourgeois democracy. He had fought against Russian totalitarianism since its inception. He was fighting German fascism, but he could not fight in the name of bourgeois democracy because he knew that the peculiar developmental laws of capitalist production would change bourgeois democracy sooner or later into fascism and state-capitalism."

"By fighting as true social-democrats for predominance in the socialist world movement, by identifying the narrow nationalistic interests of state-capitalistic Russia with the interests of the world proletariat, and by attempting to maintain at all cost the power position they had won in 1917, they were merely preparing their own downfall, which was dramatised in numerous factional struggles, reached its climax in the Moscow trials, and ended in the Stalinist Russia of today – one imperialist nation among others."

"The meaning of Bolshevism was completely revealed only with the emergence of fascism. To fight the latter, it was necessary, in Otto Rühle’s words, to recognise that ‘the struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against Bolshevism.’"

"Not long before his death, Rühle, in summing up his findings with regard to Bolshevism, did not hesitate to place Russia first among the totalitarian stares. ‘It has served as the model for other capitalistic dictatorships. Ideological divergences do not really differentiate socioeconomic systems. The abolition of private property in the means of production (combined with) the control of workers over the products of their labour and the end of the wages system.’"

"To make clear the fascist character of the Russian system, Rühle turned once more to Lenin’s Left Wing Communism – An Infantile Disorder, for ‘of all programmatic declarations of Bolshevism it was the most revealing of its real character.’ When in 1933 Hitler suppressed all socialist literature in Germany, Rühle related, Lenin’s pamphlet was allowed publication and distribution. In this work Lenin insists that the party must be a sort of war academy of professional revolutionists. Its chief requirements were unconditional leader authority, rigid centralism, iron discipline, conformity, militancy, and the sacrifice of personality for party interests - And Lenin actually developed an elite of intellectuals, a centre which, when thrown into the revolution, was to capture leadership and assume power."

"There is no longer any need to point to the many ‘misdeeds’ of Bolshevism in Germany and in the world at large. In theory and in practice the Stalinist regime declares itself a capitalistic, imperialistic power, opposing not only the proletarian revolution, but even the fascist reforms of capitalism. And it actually does favour the maintenance of bourgeois democracy in order to utilise more fully its own fascistic structure. Just as Germany was very little interested in spreading fascism over her borders and the borders of her allies since she had no intention of strengthening her imperialistic competitors, so Russia concerns herself with safeguarding democracy everywhere save within her own territory. Her friendship with bourgeois-democracy is a true friendship; fascism is no article for export, for it ceases to be an advantage as soon as it is generalised. Despite the Stalin-Hitler pact, there are no greater ‘anti-fascists’ than the Bolsheviks on behalf of their own native fascism. Only so far as their imperialistic expansion, if any, will reach, will they be guilty of consciously supporting the general fascistic trend."

"Ideological conformity depends on conditions of prosperity; it has no staying-power of its own."

"British finance, which had strangled German democracy by demanding impossible reparation, helped Hitler with investments and loans. Every intelligent world citizen knew that these favors were given to Hitler because British Tories saw in him their "strong-arm gangster" against the Soviets."

"In all lands, whether for him or against him, Stalin created history."

"In capitalist Britain, the factory appeared as a weapon of exploitation for profit. In the USSR, it was not only a means to collective wealth, but a tool consciously used to break past shackles."

"No voice today can be final about the Stalin era. Stalin is one of those who are judged by long history, the character of whose work grows clearer as it recedes from view. What we know, at least, is that he set out in 1928 to build socialism in one country, a backward peasant land surrounded by a world of foes. When he began, Russia was peasant, illiterate; when he finished, it was the world's second industrial power. Twice over he thus built it, once before the Hitler invasion and again upon the war's ruin. That stands to his credit forever; he engineered that job."

"[The Molotov–Ribbentrop] was not an alliance, such as the USSR offered Britain and France; it was merely an affirmation of neutrality such as the USSR had had with Germany since 1926, but which had fallen into disuse under Hitler. Molotov reported that the USSR signed because "the conclusion of a pact of mutual assistance (with Britain and France) could not be expected." The signing of the Pact at the moment when Europe, from hour to hour, awaited Hitler's attack on Poland, changed the balance of forces in Europe. [...] East Europe clearly hoped that the Pact, while it might not stop Hitler's attack on Poland, would stop the eastward spread of the war. Hitler's allies were angry. Mussolini and Franco openly disapproved. Terrible was the blow to Tokyo, for Japan was already fighting the USSR on the edge of Mongolia, and was reported have told Hitler that she would be ready by August to join "the big push.""

"The [Soviet] Constitution was a direct challenge to Nazi-Fascism, then in power in Germany. The Nazis called democracy outworn; all Soviet speakers hailed democracy and socialism as "unconquerable." Hitler preached "superior and inferior races." Stalin challenged him in one of the most sweeping statements ever made of human equality: "Neither language nor color of skin nor cultural backwardness nor the stage of political development can justify national and race inequality"."

"[Stalin] had a deep sense of what I can only call the "will of the people"; he had matchless technique in releasing that will in action. Lastly, he had the conviction, and was able to give it to others, that his actions carried mankind forward to a better way."

"One of the first Americans to go down into the famine district was Anna Louise Strong, who ever since has spent most of her time in the Soviet Union and through her writing and lecturing has contributed so much toward greater understanding of the Soviet Union in America."

"In the 1930s, we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within."

"In today’s situation Leninism is the key link in upholding and applying Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought. To put it somewhat provocatively, Marxism without Leninism is Eurocentric social-chauvinism and social democracy. Maoism without Leninism is nationalism (and also, in certain contexts, social-chauvinism) and bourgeois democracy."

"Fear nothing. Be down for the whole thing."

""Nice guys finish last" is a widely propagated piece of so-called "popular wisdom" in the U.S.-and this is really very revealing of the kind of society it is and the kind of society its rulers want-it is a willing self-exposure on their part. But we are out to do something very radical, to overturn all this. We are out for nothing less than to finish first and remain "nice guys" all the way through: to win victory for the proletariat, not just in the U.S. but worldwide, and bring into being a radically different world with radically different people-a world of freely and consciously cooperating human beings, without inequality, oppression, and class distinctions—a communist world."

"The so-called "demise of communism" is really just revisionism becoming more openly bourgeois. This does not constitute a "crisis" for genuine communism and it is not a bad thing for us—for the international proletariat and the international communist movement... Strategically, it is a fine thing for us."

"In taking up the revolutionary struggle against the system and taking up the most revolutionary ideology to guide that struggle, people can and do change themselves. In rising up and overthrowing the system, they begin to make themselves into new people."

"We should instill in the victims of this system an attitude of despising this system and all it stands for—of recognizing that this system represents not the "wave of the future" but the dregs of the past—that it is the thing standing in the way of a much brighter future."

"If you don't have a poetic spirit—or at least a poetic side—it is very dangerous for you to lead a Marxist movement or be the leader of a socialist state."

"Socialist society should be the farthest thing from a stagnant and dreary place. But it will never be that if everything is "top down" and if people are told that the leadership always knows what's right, that it will take care of everything, that everybody must march precisely in step, and so on. How can we, when we're in power, despise and suppress the very kinds of things we welcome and promote now-nonconformity, critical thinking, the unwillingness to blindly follow authority, and so on?"

"In the present period and the present "global environment," the requirements of the capitalist economic and social system not only demand that the lords of capital be able to carry out their supreme commandment, "let us prey," in a more unrestrained and more "mobile" way, on a world scale. They also demand, within American society itself, a slashing of major social programs and a heightening of the repressive powers of government, along with the fostering of a repressive social atmosphere. They demand what the organization Refuse and Resist! has called the politics of cruelty, or the politics of poverty, punishment, and patriarchy."

"There is a great irony here: the very "triumph" and "triumphalism" of capitalism in today's circumstances has produced effects and sentiments which tend to undermine, among significant sections of the U.S. population, the willingness to make personal sacrifices for "god and country"—that is, for the interests and requirements of the imperial ruling class, within the U.S. itself and in the world arena. In reaction to this, the "conservatives," with the Christian Right playing a decisive role, are attempting to revive and impose precisely "the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism"—to resurrect a situation where worldwide exploitation that is unsurpassed in its brutality is at the same time "veiled by religious and political illusions.""

"Based on a serious examination—not only of their approach to crime and punishment but their overall politics and ideology—our Party has identified the fundamentalist theocrats like Robertson as Christian fascists. Their ideology and program, without exaggeration, amount to NAZI-ism dressed in religious robes and tailored to contemporary American society in the present world context."

"As to participation in the bourgeois electoral process, our Party has made clear our understanding that this process is an instrument of capitalist rule—an instrument of what is in fact bourgeois dictatorship. Which candidates are to be regarded as "serious contenders" and, more importantly, the terms of debate and contention and the "political alternatives" that are treated as legitimate and "realistic"—all this is determined within the ranks of the ruling class itself. Elections only offer the people the opportunity to choose among those alternatives."

"People's political views will naturally be influenced by their ideological outlook. The essential question, with regard to all political programs, policies, and actions—and all beliefs and ideologies—is what is their content, what interests do they uphold and further, what effect do they have on society and the people?"

"Our goal is the radical transformation of society, and of the world, to eliminate all oppressive and exploitative relations among people and to abolish all class distinctions and national antagonisms and barriers, to bring about, as the final goal, a freely associating community of human beings, worldwide. The morals and ideology we uphold and strive to apply are in accordance with that objective and are, at any given point, an expression of the link between the current struggle and the final goal."

"Standing up against the unspeakable crimes carried out by the ruling class of your own country and striving for a world in which such outrages would no longer exist, is something far, far greater than being cogs and instruments in the machinery of destruction and killing that enforces and adds to these crimes."

"In a "free country" like the U.S. you are free to ask questions, but you are not really free to question."

"If we're going to achieve our objectives in the most fundamental sense, if we're going to win in both senses—that is, if we're actually going to seize power and be able to carry out transformations and if we're going to do that guided by what our objectives are, to get to a whole different kind of world— winning in both those senses requires this kind of outlook and methodology, this kind of openness to the ideas, to the efforts, of others—and to their criticisms. Which doesn't mean we should tail people and doesn't mean we should agree with what we don't agree with. In other words, you can criticize me all day long, but if your criticism isn't valid to me, I'm not going to agree with it—and I shouldn't. Now, I may be wrong. Your criticism may be valid, but I'm like everybody else (everybody is this way, or should be): you have to be convinced. And it is true for everybody that, if you're not convinced, then eventually that's going to show up. You can be intimidated, or you can be overwhelmed, or you can be cajoled, but if you're not really won over, eventually the negative consequences of that are going to show up. So we shouldn't agree with people just because we want to be open. It's not a game we're playing; it's not a tactic; it's not a gimmick; it's not diplomacy. It's a question of fundamental methodology."

"So this is another contradictory aspect of reality we have to understand: on the one hand, Marxism is the only world outlook and methodology that enables you to thoroughly and systematically and in a comprehensive way engage and learn more and more deeply about reality; but it isn't true that people who don't have the Marxist outlook and methodology, or are even opposed to it, cannot discover important truths. There's not only Darwin but Einstein and many other people throughout history, going back even before Marxism was brought into being. Obviously, such people have discovered many important truths, and that will continue to be the case, even in the socialist transition period—this is a very important point to understand or we'll make some very serious errors in the direction of bureaucratism, dogmatism, and some of the errors that we associate, for example, with Stalin."

"When the proletariat is in power, however, in a certain sense "everything's on us." There's a problem in health care? We have to solve it. We can't say, "Those capitalists, what a bunch of assholes—look what they do with health care!" We have to solve the problem. If there's a problem in the educational sphere, we have to solve it. (Or we have to set things on the road to solving these things, because everything isn't immediately solvable—that's also one of the complexities of what we have to deal with.) But in a certain basic sense, it's on us. We don't get to pass the buck to anybody else or curse anybody else for not solving the problem. We have to solve it. And that's a tremendous thing. We want to have those problems. We're longing and striving to have precisely those problems, because we do have a solution—in socialist society and through the socialist transition to communism, those problems can and will be solved. But then that's the way it is, and it's on you."

"No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that."

"Now I can just hear these reactionary fools saying, “Well, Bob, answer me this. If this country is so terrible, why do people come here from all over the world? Why are so many people trying to get in, not get out?”...Why? I’ll tell you why. Because you have fucked up the rest of the world even worse than what you have done in this country. You have made it impossible for many people to live in their own countries as part of gaining your riches and power."

"The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness."

"This system and those who rule over it are not capable of carrying out economic development to meet the needs of the people now, while balancing that with the needs of future generations and requirements of safeguarding the environment. They care nothing for the rich diversity of the earth and its species, for the treasures this contains, except when and where they can turn this into profit for themselves....These people are not fit to be the caretakers of the earth."

"Now let’s imagine, let’s step out of this world that they keep us chained in. And let’s imagine what this future can and will be like. When we finally get to the final goal of communism, there won’t be the relations of exploitation and oppression that are so commonplace and that mark all of society today and that we are told over and over again are just the natural order of things and the way things have to be. As Karl Marx pointed out, the communist revolution leads to what we Maoists call the “4 Alls”—that is, the abolition of all class differences among people. The abolition or the end to all the production or economic relations underlying these class differences and divisions among people. The ending of all the social relations that go along with these economic or production relations. Oppressive relations between men and women, between different nationalities, between people of different parts of the world, all that will be put an end to and moved beyond. And finally, the revolutionizing of all the ideas that go along with this whole way, this whole capitalist system, these whole social relations. In place of this, what will be the guiding principles in society consciously and voluntarily taken up by people...not forced on them, but consciously and voluntarily taken up as the basis for having abolished exploitation, oppression and inequality? In its place will be collective and cooperative principles aiming for the common good and at the same time, within that, individuals and individuality flourishing in a way that has never been possible before."

"There is not one human nature. There is not some uniform and unchanging way that everybody is and how everybody sees the world. Human nature has different meanings in different times and for different classes and groups in society."

"In advancing toward and in finally realizing communism, the objective and the approach is not, and must not be, to “flatten everything out”—it is to continue to advance toward overcoming social inequality and, beyond that, to move beyond calculations of equality and inequality by realizing and implementing the principle of “from each according to their ability to each according to their need.”"

"What are we communists? We are not, to refer to Eldridge Cleaver’s phrase, “the baddest motherfuckers on the planet earth”—at least not quite in the sense that he meant it. We are a reflection, we are the conscious expression, of this fundamental contradiction of capitalism—of how it is tending, and of the need for the world-historic struggle to resolve this contradiction in the interests of the masses of people through proletarian revolution and the advance to communism, worldwide. That is what we communists are. We are the conscious expression of that."

"There cannot be a proletarian revolution if there are no class-conscious proletarians striving for that revolution."

"We are not going to have, and there never will be, a proletarian revolution that is made with “pure proletarians,” especially as conceived of with an economist outlook and approach (reducing the workers and the scope of their struggle to merely the economic sphere, reducing the struggle of the working class to immediate concerns involving wages and related questions, or in any case limiting it to the economic sphere, with the highest expression of that being something like a general strike). Revolution is not going to be a general strike, as the Trotskyites and others with essentially the same viewpoint and approach think—if they even think about revolution. But, beyond that, it’s not going to be a neat unfolding of something where, in direct proportion and mechanical relation to how many proletarians there are, that much more powerful will be the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. It’s going to be much more contradictory and complex than that, in some ways acutely so."

"The interests, objectives, and grand designs of the imperialists are not our interests—they are not the interests of the great majority of people in the U.S. nor of the overwhelming majority of people in the world as a whole. And the difficulties the imperialists have gotten themselves into in pursuit of these interests must be seen, and responded to, not from the point of view of the imperialists and their interests, but from the point of view of the great majority of humanity and the basic and urgent need of humanity for a different and better world, for another way."

"Reality is like a fire, like a burning object, and if you want to pick up that burning object and move it, you have to have an instrument with which to do it. If you try to do it bare-handed, the result is not going to be good. That's another way of getting at the role of theory in relation to the larger world that needs to be transformed, in relation to practice, and in particular revolutionary practice, to change the world."

"American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives"

"Here I want to bring up a formulation that I love, because it captures so much that is essential. Soon after September 11 someone said, or wrote somewhere, that living in the U.S. is a little bit like living in the house of Tony Soprano. You know, or you have a sense, that all the goodies that you've gotten have something to do with what the master of the house is doing out there in the world. Yet you don't want to look too deeply or too far at what that might be, because it might upset everything—not only what you have, all your possessions, but all the assumptions on which you base your life."

"There is a place where epistemology and morality meet. There is a place where you have to stand and say: It is not acceptable to refuse to look at something—or to refuse to believe something—because it makes you uncomfortable. And: It is not acceptable to believe something just because it makes you feel comfortable."

"There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth."

"Now, of course, slavery was not the only factor that played a significant part in the emergence of the U.S. as a world power, whose economic strength underlies its massive military force. A major historical factor in all this was the theft of land, on a massive scale, from Mexico as well as from native peoples. But, in turn, much of that conquest of land was, for a long period of time up until the Civil War, largely to expand the slave system. “Remember the Alamo,” we are always reminded. Well, many of the “heroes” of the Alamo were slave traders and slave chasers... And expanding the slave system was a major aim of the overall war with Mexico, although that war also led to the westward expansion of the developing capitalist system centered in the northern United States."

"Not only did slavery play a major role in the historical development of the U.S., but the wealth and power of the U.S. rests today on a worldwide system of imperialist exploitation that ensnares hundreds of millions, and ultimately billions, of people in conditions hardly better than those of slaves. Now, if this seems like an extreme or extravagant claim, think about the tens of millions of children throughout the Third World who, from a very, very early age, are working nearly every day of the year—as the slaves on the southern plantations in the United States used to say, “from can’t see in the morning, till can’t see at night”—until they’ve been physically used up, with their lives literally passing, bit by bit, day after day, from them into the machinery on which they’re working (or which, in a real sense, is working on them, wearing their lives away) and into the products which they are producing through this labor. These are conditions very similar to outright slavery, and they often go along with superstructural expressions which are very close to slavery—ways in which, through customs and traditions, and sometimes even formal codes, the lives of these children, and others in these conditions, are controlled, confined and degraded. This includes overt sexual harassment of women, and many other degradations as well. All this is the foundation on which the imperialist system rests, with U.S. imperialism now sitting atop it all."

"Look at all these beautiful children who are female in the world. And in addition to all the other outrages which I have referred to, in terms of children throughout the slums and shantytowns of the Third World, in addition to all the horrors that will be heaped on them—the actual living in garbage and human waste in the hundreds of millions as their fate, laid out before them, yes, even before they are born—there is, on top of this, for those children who are born female, the horror of everything that this will bring simply because they are female in a world of male domination. And this is true not only in the Third World. In "modern" countries like the U.S. as well, the statistics barely capture it: the millions who will be raped; the millions more who will be routinely demeaned, deceived, degraded, and all too often brutalized by those who are supposed to be their most intimate lovers; the way in which so many women will be shamed, hounded and harassed if they seek to exercise reproductive rights through abortion, or even birth control; the many who will be forced into prostitution and pornography; and all those who—if they do not have that particular fate, and even if they achieve some success in this "new world" where supposedly there are no barriers for women—will be surrounded on every side, and insulted at every moment, by a society and a culture which degrades women, on the streets, in the schools and workplaces, in the home, on a daily basis and in countless ways."

"This takes us back to the very important point from "The End of a Stage—The Beginning of a New Stage" about unresolved contradictions under socialism. What is said there is another way of expressing the understanding that the struggle for the complete emancipation of women will be a crucial part of "the final revolution." In other words, it will be a crucial component in propelling and driving forward not only the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the rule of capitalism-imperialism but to continue the revolution, within the new, socialist society itself, in order to advance on the road toward the final aim of communism. The point is that, among the unresolved contradictions which will remain in socialist society, and which can be a driving force propelling that revolution forward, the continuing ways in which the emancipation of women will need to be fought for and fought through will be one of the most decisive aspects and expressions of that."

"Even with very real changes in the situation of Black people, as part of the larger changes in the society (and the world) overall—including a growth of the "middle class" among Black people, an increase in college graduates and people in higher paying and prestigious professions, with a few holding powerful positions within the ruling political structures, even to the extent now of a "Black president"—the situation of Black people, and in particular that of millions and millions who are trapped in the oppressive and highly repressive conditions of the inner city ghettos, remains a very acute and profound contradiction for the American imperialist system as a whole and for its ruling class—something which has the potential to erupt totally out of the framework in which they can contain it. And something which, at the same time, is a point of very sharp contention and spur to mobilization, not only of potential revolutionary forces, but also now of reactionary and potential or actual fascist forces."

"What is involved in "Enriched What Is To Be Done-ism" is sharply and scientifically exposing the system, bringing to light the causes and reasons for the oppression that different sections of the people suffer and the outrages that masses of people detest; showing, in a living way, how all this is rooted in and has as its source the system of capitalism-imperialism, which perpetuates and enforces this on a daily basis and in horrific dimensions; illustrating, through the application of a scientific, dialectical materialist method, how different sections of the people tend to respond to different events in society and the world, and how this relates to their position within the overall production and social relations; bringing forward and setting before all, and boldly struggling for, our revolutionary and communist orientation and convictions; and mobilizing people, yes, to fight back against oppression but to do so on the basis and with the orientation and aim of building a movement for revolution, toward the goal of sweeping aside the capitalist-imperialist system, bringing into being a new, socialist system and continuing to advance, together with people struggling throughout the world, toward the final goal of communism; and setting before the masses of people not only the goals of the revolution and the basic strategy for making revolution, as embodied in the line and policies of the party, but also the problems of making revolution, involving growing numbers of the masses in grappling with and helping to resolve these contradictions in the direction of revolution and communism."

"In a world marked by exploitative and oppressive divisions—where one of the most profound, and most oppressive, of these divisions involves the subjugation and degradation of the female half of humanity—the assertion of "manhood," whatever the intent might be in doing so, can objectively only mean, and find expression as, active participation in that subjugation and degradation."

"A genuinely radical, liberating revolt—as opposed to a reactionary "rebranding" and celebration of parasitism—must be fostered among the youth in today's conditions, a revolt within which the need is powerfully raised for a new society and a new world, which will move to eliminate the urban/suburban contradiction, and antagonism, in the context of the transformation of society, and the world, overall and the abolition of profound inequalities and divisions—opposing, overcoming and moving beyond the parasitism which is such an integral and indispensable part of the operation and dynamics of imperialism, and has reached such unprecedented heights in "late imperial America." In short, we need, in today's circumstances, a counter-culture that contributes to and is increasingly part of building a movement for revolution—in opposition to a counter-revolutionary culture. We need a culture of radical opposition to the essence of everything that is wrong with this society and system, and the many different manifestations of that; we need an active searching for a radically better world, within which revolution and communism is a powerful and continually growing pole of attraction."

"The situation cannot be allowed to continue where the alternatives with major social impact within this society are self-indulgent individualism, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, religious fundamentalism and subordination and sacrifice of the self to the collective juggernaut of imperialist conquest and plunder, as for example in the U.S. military; and where, in one form or another, a culture and morality serving the interests of the most monstrous exploiters and oppressors—and a system which does indeed, without the slightest bit of exaggeration, crush lives and mangle spirits on a massive scale, throughout the world, while having the audacity to present itself as the best of all possible systems and a shining example for the world—has virtually unchallenged hegemony."

"We also need to be aware of the positive—and in significant ways "subversive of the system"—potential of the assertion of gay "identity" and gay rights, even with the very real contradictions in this, including the narrowing tendencies of "identity politics" as well as conservatizing influences related to traditional marriage, and, for that matter, the campaign to be allowed to be part of the imperialist military while being openly gay. Even with all that, in its principal aspect this has, and can to an even greater degree have, a very positive, "subversive of the system" effect. This is a contradiction which, in the society overall, is "out of the closet." It could be forced back into the closet, and underground, with not only the stronger assertion of the kind of fascist movement that is being supported and fostered by powerful ruling class forces in this period, but with the actual assumption of a fascist form of bourgeois dictatorship. But the struggle against the oppression of gay people is not going to be easily suppressed."

"In the way this country has been built, and for the powers that be in this country, the humanity of Black people has never counted for anything—they have never been valued as human beings, but only as things to be exploited, oppressed, and repressed."

"In fundamental terms, we have two choices: either, live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!"

"White supremacy and capitalism—it is not possible to overcome and finally abolish the one without overthrowing and finally abolishing the other."

"Only through the overthrow of this system, including in its greatest centers of power in the imperialist countries themselves—an overthrow carried out also with the aim of preventing these imperialists from launching an all-out war of annihilation—only in this way can we advance toward the goal of overcoming the divisions among human beings that embody exploitation and oppression, and lead to violent conflict, and finally make a reality of the aspirations of so many for a world without war."

"While determined and massive struggle needs to be waged against these inhuman actions by the U.S. (and other oppressive governments), it should be clear that there can be no solution, under the system of capitalism-imperialism, to the situation involving masses of immigrants and refugees. The only solution lies in the revolution to overthrow this system—a revolution aiming not just to abolish oppression, exploitation, poverty, and misery in one country but having as its fundamental goal the abolition of all this throughout the world, and the elimination of all borders and boundaries that erect walls between different parts of humanity."

"Obviously, we have only one Earth as a home for humanity, and this climate crisis can only be fundamentally and ultimately addressed on a world scale. But a first great step, or leap, can be taken by wresting power from the capitalist-imperialist system in its most powerful stronghold, and making this a source of inspiration and base of support for people around the world in rising up to overthrow and abolish all systems and relations of exploitation, oppression, plunder, and destruction, of the environment and of human beings who can only continue to exist, and to thrive, through a rational and planned interaction with the rest of nature."

"The rulers of this system and their political operatives and media mouthpieces are forever pointing to the “success stories” of people who have “risen” from the ranks of the poor and oppressed to become rich and famous, or at least to realize the great “American dream” of becoming middle class! This is like going to a casino, where, by far, most people who play are played for suckers and sink deeper into a hole, while every time there is a winner it is loudly celebrated, often with bells, sirens, and so on—to make people believe that, if they just keep playing, they too can become “winners.”"

"A major role of the Democratic Party is “corralling” and “domesticating” dissent."

"The police, the armed forces, the “intelligence agencies,” the courts, and so on—all this represents the dictatorship of the capitalist-imperialist system."

"This is not a revolution for revenge—the goal is not for exploited and oppressed humanity to have a chance to become exploiters and oppressors themselves—it is a communist revolution whose goal is nothing less than putting an end to all relations of exploitation and oppression, and all the degradation and destruction bound up with this, throughout the world."

"The truth is that social democrats in an imperialist country must ultimately and fundamentally be pro-imperialism. This is an essential characteristic and requirement of social democracy in a country like this."

"Limiting things to nonviolence, in all circumstances and as some kind of supposed absolute principle—opposing a revolutionary struggle carried out by millions of people to overthrow this system when the conditions that make that possible have been brought into being—means at least objectively accepting and accommodating to this monstrous system and the very violent institutions (in particular the armed forces and police) that enforce its rule, here and throughout the world, with the most massive and heinous atrocity."

"This crisis with the coronavirus has brought into sharp relief the reality that the capitalist system is not simply out of step with but is in fundamental conflict with, and a direct obstacle to, meeting the needs of the masses of humanity."

"Far too often, people who claim to be “woke” say that, since Black people have always been subjected to horrific oppression in this country, Trump is no different than other politicians, and there is no reason, and no need, to focus on opposing Trump and building mass mobilization to demand the removal of the Trump/Pence regime. This is like arguing that, since this country was founded in slavery, it makes no difference if slavery is brought back now! People need to understand that Trump is a genocidal racist."

"“Black conservatives,” like Candace Owens, want to “get in on” the “spoils” that come from this system’s plunder of people, here and around the world, and they desperately want to be accepted in the “high society” of the monstrous oppressors like Trump. These “Black conservatives” basically agree with the crude racism of their white fascist counterparts. Like “house slaves” living in the master’s house in old times, they fear that they will be “dragged down” by being associated with “those” Black people—those who are not “well behaved” and rebel against their oppressed conditions, especially those who dare to rise up against the brutality and murder of Black people by police."

"Bob Avakian is a long distance runner in the freedom struggle against imperialism, racism and capitalism."

"Having gone and listened to a live, public Bob Avakian speech, as I have, is to be exposed to one of the most provocative, serious and controversial social thinkers of our time. He's an American original who should be heard, debated and critiqued for these dramatic and troubling times."

"Bob Avakian has made trenchant observations and brought insightful analyses to a host of problems confronting contemporary society. He is genuinely concerned about the plight of the masses and has given much critical thought regarding proposed solutions for their uplift."

"For a brief time, roughly between 1912 and 1918, The Masses became the rallying center-as sometimes also a combination of circus, nursery, and boxing ring-for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture. In its pages you could find brilliant artists and cartoonists, like John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Art Young; one of the best journalists in our history, John Reed (journalist), a writer full of an indignation against American injustice that was itself utterly American; a shrewd and caustic propagandist like Max Eastman; some gifted writers of fiction, like Sherwood Anderson; and one of the few serious theoretical minds American socialism has produced, William English Walling. All joined in a rumpus of revolt, tearing to shreds the genteel tradition that had been dominant in American culture, poking fun at moral prudishness and literary timidity, mocking the deceits of bourgeois individualism, and preaching a peculiarly uncomplicated version of the class struggle. There has never been, and probably never will again be, another radical magazine in the U. S. quite like The Masses, with its slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope."

"Behind them still throbbed the tradition of nineteenth-century American radicalism, the un-ambiguous nay-saying of Thoreau and the Abolitionists. This tradition implied that the individual person was still able to square off against the authority of the state; it signified a stance-one could not quite speak of it as a politics-of individual defiance and rectitude, little concerned because little involved with the complexities of society. The radicalism of nineteenth-century New England had been a radicalism of individual declaration far more than of collective action; and while Eastman and his friends were indeed connected with a movement, the Socialist party of Debs, in essential spirit they were intellectual freebooters, more concerned with speaking out than speaking to. They swore by Marx, but behind them could still be heard the voices of Thoreau and Wendell Phillips-and it was a good thing."

"As one looks back across the shambles of the intervening decades, it is hard not to envy them: the fierce young Reed making his prose into a lyric of revolt, the handsome young Eastman mediating among a raucus of opinions, the cherubic Art Young drawing his revolutionary cartoons with the other worldly aplomb of a Bronson Alcott. History cannot be recalled, but in this instance at least, nostalgia seems a part of realism. For who among us, if enabled by some feat of imagination, would not change places with the men of The Masses in their days of glory?"

"One explanation for the neglect of women's part in shaping The Masses and its content may lie in an image of the magazine constructed by its chroniclers. Indeed, the extent to which historians have neglected discussion of Masses women is quite remarkable. Daniel Aaron, in his Writers on the Left (1961), devotes some twenty pages to The Masses. He deals with Eastman, Dell, and Reed at considerable length, while mentioning the founding members Inez Haynes Irwin and Mary Heaton Vorse in a single line. Even more remarkable is Irving Howe's introduction to William L. O'Neill's 1966 Masses anthology, Echoes of Revolt. While O'Neill himself does include a representative selection of work by Masses women in the anthology, Howe achieves the remarkable feat of writing his entire introduction without mentioning a single female contributor. Howe concludes resoundingly: "For who among us... would not change places with the men of The Masses in their days of glory?" More recent histories redress the balance somewhat-notably Judith Schwartz's study of women of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy club, many of whose members had ties with The Masses, and Art for The Masses, Rebecca Zurier's 1987 anthology of the work of Masses artists. Nancy Cott's frequent allusions to Masses women in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) indicate how very central to that grounding, to the shaping of turn-of-the-century feminist discourse, Masses women were. But in many imaginations, The Masses remains the project of Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed (journalist), Art Young, and Charles Winter."

"the translation of Yiddish literature into English by the -- beginning with Irving Howe, totally erased women, so it was even worse in English than it actually was in Yiddish."

"In 1954 Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg defined and popularized yidishe veltlekhe kultur/"worldly" or secular Yiddish culture for English readers through their extensive introduction and selections in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. This culture intellectual dialogues, arts, and history appeared to be devoid of women and women's concerns, except as depicted and interpreted by men...By 1976, this tradition was an accepted historical fact which informed and titled Howe's massive history World of Our Fathers. Both Dawidowicz and Howe understood the complexity and richness of yidishe veltlekhe kultur with its probing intellectual controversies, bitter political debates and artistic expression. Yet their histories, distorted by their omissions, have been perpetuated by other scholars and translators. Until now, English readers non-Jews and Jews - have had little access to women's individual and collective roles and achievements in Yiddish-speaking communities on both sides of the Atlantic."

"Radical Jews of the 1960s and 1970s were the most bitter critics of Jewish suburbia. Irving Howe contended that assimilation there had extinguished some of the most distinctive qualities of the Jewish spirit: "an eager restlessness, a moral anxiety, an openness to novelty, a hunger for dialectic, a refusal of contentment, an ironic criticism of all fixed opinion." Certainly, these qualities describe the Jewish women activists in this book."

"As she explained to Joel Gardner a few months after she had resigned from the Communist Party: “If I were to write a book, I'd make the title of the book... a phrase out of the Communist song "The International." . . . The phrase goes, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us." Well, I would make the title of my book "Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us," because my argument would be that just as... capitalism operates through the false consciousness that it gives the majority of people who aren't able to perceive the reality of their own lives..., so the same thing happens with Marxists. . . . They, too, substitute a false consciousness for a real consciousness . . . . A real revolutionary party [has] to be able to constantly keep alive that challenging, questioning and probing of the real scene around it. . . . Our theory never will quite match the reality, but at least one strives to approximate it, to see what is the substance, and not just the form. (p 13)"

"My concept of what it meant to be a revolutionary was based on a montage of the organizers from the Sinclair novels, along with my childhood memories from Denver. I also began to read an enormous amount of history around this time. I was very taken with Charles Beard-at that point his writings seemed to me to represent great Marxist truths because he talked about the things that high school history never talked about, the underlying economic motives of history makers. I read everything he and his wife Mary Beard wrote. I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me."

"It seems to be that Lincoln's definition of democracy, "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people," is as good a summary as any of an essential element of the kind of socialism I would like to see established in the United States. Socialist democracy means democracy in the economic as well as in the political sphere."

"Hitler's triumph made terribly clear the danger of our earlier notions, as well as the very stark differences between a fascist regime and "bourgeois democracy" as represented by someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By the mid-1930s the issue of anti-fascism permeated all our mass work. In countries like France and Spain where big socialist movements existed, Communists sought to unite the Left into antifascist united fronts. In the United States we sought to work with the socialists, and we also began to reevaluate our earlier, highly critical assessment of the New Deal."

"Our dream ticket would have been one consisting of Martin Luther King and Benjamin Spock, linking the issues of civil rights and peace."

"The great irony of the McCarthy period is that we did almost as much damage to ourselves, in the name of purifying our ranks, as Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and all the other witch-hunters combined were able to do. One of the most catastrophically stupid things we ever did was to choose this moment to launch an internal campaign against white chauvinism. (In the Party we tended to use the term "white chauvinism" instead of racism.) The campaign was initiated by Pettis Perry and Betty Gannett in 1949. [...] However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. [...] In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner. (pp.125ff)"

"The challenge for American socialists will be to come up with ways to make use of modified market principles and coordinated (rather than "central") planning to guide decision making under circumstances vastly different than those faced by the pioneers of 1917. (p 252)"

"Socialist politics should mean more not less debate; socialist democracy will involve an ongoing debate over all the important issues confronting the nation. Genuine democratic debate requires a genuinely free press. My travels to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union convinced me of the necessity for the independence of the mass media from state and Party control. Most people did not believe what they read in the official press or saw or heard on radio or television. Their daily lives belied the "official" facts. A socialist America should not only ensure a free press, it should guarantee as well something that does not exist today under capitalism, and that is the widest possible access to popular communication for individuals and groups. Real democracy is impossible unless people know the facts behind proposed policies, unless they hear all the relevant arguments pro and con-which is something that our own corporate-dominated media has almost as little interest in promoting as the Party-dominated media in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union. (p 252)"

"I won't see socialism in my lifetime; I don't know if my son will see it in his, or even my grandchildren in theirs. There is no way to foretell what kind of political developments and issues will galvanize a future generation to turn towards socialism. The model I embraced in my youth, the vision of a vanguard party of the working class seizing power in the midst of a great social and political crisis like the one that had overtaken Russia in 1917, is no longer relevant. But I still believe that working people must be at the center of any real movement for socialism, for they are the majority for whose well-being that government "of, by, and for the people" should be concerned. Ultimately I have faith that people, given the understanding of how they can help bring it about, want to live in a better world. People can change the world, but they can't do it as individuals alone. They have to join with others to do it. One thing I have not changed my views on over the years is the belief that organization is the key to winning victories for social change. That's why it was such a tragedy that so little in the way of organized radicalism survived the collapse of the New Left. (p 252)"

"People must have a channel through which they can express themselves if there is to be any hope that they will transcend the sense of powerlessness and apathy encouraged by our dominant ideological myths. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition has come closest in recent times to serving as this kind of channel. One could see a glimmer of the possibilities for the future, watching the young people who were Jesse Jackson delegates at the Democratic conventions in 1984 and 1988. Many had never participated in any political movement before, and you could see how the Jackson campaign had opened things up for them and gave a whole new dimension to their lives. The Rainbow Coalition has had its share of internal problems, but it has been far more successful than any of the more explicitly ideological groups on the Left in teaching people to give an affirmative answer to the old Biblical question, "Am I my brothers [and sisters] keeper?" One keeps oneself only by keeping others. That means we have to learn to look upon the societies of this world as things which have been created by humans and which are therefore subject to being changed for the better by humans. (p 254)"

"my loyalties are to a vision of socialism, not to a particular organization. There's a phrase I've always liked in the revolutionary anthem "The International." It goes, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us." As Communists we argued that the survival of capitalism depended on the false consciousness of the majority of the people who weren't able to perceive the reality of their own lives. Ironically, the Communists also found themselves bound by "tradition's chains," and substituted a false consciousness for a real understanding of the world around them. The challenge that faces the Left in the future-if it is to have a future-is to base itself on the knowledge of what collective action by human beings can mean, rather than on faith in the infallibility of either its dogma or its leaders. If I were allowed just one piece of advice to give a new generation as to how to sustain a life-long commitment, I would suggest the cultivation of those two essential virtues of a good revolutionary, patience and irony. (p 254)"

"Few histories that have been written about the labor movement in the 1930s have focused on the intensity of the employer violence against the labor movement. Employers in the United States have historically been far more violent in their repression of the labor movement than employers in any other Western country. There was far more solidaritv between workers who were on strike, far more awareness of the meaning of the slogan "an injury to one is an injury to all.""

"(Today labor is often looked at as merely an arbiter for wages and benefits. Do you think labor leaders today have defined the mission of the labor movement too narrowly?) That is not new, that was started under Samuel Gompers who said that the purpose of the labor movement was "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." But you can't separate the worker and the community. I think it is a survival question. The labor movement must awaken in its ranks and leadership a broader awareness. Workers need to understand what causes the export of jobs so they can unite to prohibit the export of jobs to places that do not allow workers to organize to get decent working conditions. The leadership must recognize that without that, the labor movement is cutting its own throat. It's not a question of abstract protectionism-it's a question of protecting both the foreign worker and the American worker. Even the United Auto Workers (UAW) has recognized there has to be a global approach to the problems of the automobile industry, that it can't be solved country by country. Workers have to be organized because the corporate interests are already organized-multinationals are far more class-conscious than the workers have been."

"Daytime meetings and the demand for child care facilities would open enormous doors for women. Again, we have to judge how many unions are really on the cutting edge of such issues-not how much lip service they can give-but how many issues they really make into significant contractual questions in collective bargaining."

"What is so long overdue is this pressure to put women in official positions, particularly in unions such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union."

"you have to look at the differences that exist among women and figure out how to organize to diminish the differences, to transcend the differences, to have policies that overcome them. That's very difficult, it means constant thinking, and studied awareness of what the realities are. It's not a short-term struggle, it's not meant for people who are going to fight today and run away and do something else tomorrow. It's a long-term struggle that requires tenacity and courage."

"I have an incurable belief in the potential of working class people. I believe that ultimately, the need to organize, the need to strike, it may get detoured, it may be a very long detour but ultimately it gets back on the road again."

"Corporations couldn't care less about welfare-community welfare, the nation's welfare. In the absence of any countervailing pressure, I don't see any way they can be held accountable. The public must be educated to understand that the most fateful decisions in their lives are being made not by politicians sitting in Congress whom they can watch and see, but by corporate executives who make the major decisions affecting their lives-whether they will have jobs, whether their children will have jobs, where they are going to live, whether they are going to live in a healthy atmosphere. Until people in great numbers start to understand the significance of the corporate decisions made privately, I don't see much likelihood of any important regulation of them."

"You've got to accompany any demand for privatization with worker and community control. It shouldn't only be the worker, it should be the worker and the community participating together."

"when push comes to shove I still believe that until there is no longer the private control of the commanding heights of the economy, you can't fundamentally solve anything. Public or social ownership is needed-and that is a lot different than state ownership."

"The late Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a longtime CPUSA official, once remarked that Healey was a good leader in her District but was afflicted with a psychosis when she attended national meetings, because she insisted on challenging the leadership. FBI memorandum, August 6, 1969. I had seen many women in the Party who worked very hard and were intelligent and developed theoretically and politically, but I hadn't seen anyone with quite Dorothy's energy and charisma. I do remember very clearly certain Party conventions that I was at in the sixties where I saw her as the "embattled female." It was like this sea of cigar smoke, and she smoked these little cigarillos, and there was something about that, her being little, and she'd barge into these circles of men conversing on something or other, whatever caucus it was, she'd barge in there, and I just loved it. I thought that was great, just great. I didn't care what she said."

"One of the things I'd say about Dorothy is that she has a great capacity to listen sympathetically and to be able to see the other person's point of view. She might have disagreed with ideas that people were articulating (not just these young Black people; it was true of many people that she would encounter), but she could see from the point of view of their culture and who they were personally why they were saying the things they were. At the same time she would be able to articulate alternative ways of thinking. That's a great gift. It's very helpful to people. It allows them to see things in a different way than if you come at people with your line and bash them over the head with your pickax and say, "You're wrong, you're counter-revolutionary, you're petit bourgeois." You do that with people and they say, "Bye.""

"The knowledge I gained about the Che-Lumumba Club did not satisfy me completely, because I had little firsthand knowledge of the larger Party. Kendra and Franklin, therefore, introduced me to some of the white comrades. I began to pay visits to Dorothy Healey, who was then the District Organizer of Southern California. We had long, involved discussions-sometimes arguments-about the Party, its role within the movement, its potential as the vanguard party of the working class; its potential as the party that would lead the United States from its present, backward, historically exploitative stage to a new epoch of socialism. I immensely enjoyed these discussions with Dorothy and felt that I was learning a great deal from them, regardless of whether I ultimately decided to become a Communist myself."

"Dorothy Healey, a 1930s communist union organizer of the migrant workers and head of the southern California region of the Communist Party for two decades, including the four years I lived in L.A., recounted the 1938 cotton strike and celebrated the militancy and solidarity of the Okie cotton pickers, hardly mentioning that the strike was lost, or that two decades later, the children of the pickers were serving as L.A. police officers or were active in the John Birch Society. Furthermore, Dorothy and other Communist Party people perceived the 1930s Okie migrants as responsive to the Communist Party."

"A successful teach-in on campus during that fall of 1966 helped raise consciousness, although only a small percentage of students and faculty were involved. Noam Chomsky and Herbert Marcuse were the main speakers, but there were dozens more, and the event went on for fourteen hours, with thousands crowded into the student union cafeteria. I was distressed that none of the speakers were women. Dorothy Healey of the Communist Party was scheduled to speak but the Progressive Labor Party people-the Maoists-disrupted her presentation. That was my first personal encounter with infighting on the Left."

"one of the American left's most brilliant and fearless women-a pioneer in the '30s and role model for activists in the '90s."

"To me she represented what was most appealing about the Old Left — commitment, dedication, selflessness...In devoting herself to working for peace, and against economic and racial inequality, she provided a fantastic model for the rest of us. I will always remember her fondly."

"Beginning in 1937, UCAPAWA-CIO offered hope. Four decades later, I asked Dorothy Ray Healey to recall her most rewarding experience as a labor organizer. Her answer: "To watch the disappearance or at least the diminishing of bigotry... watching all those Okies and Arkies and that bigotry and small-mindedness-all their lives they'd been on a little farm in Oklahoma; probably they had never seen a Black or a Mexicano. And you'd watch in the process of a strike how those white workers soon saw that those white cops were their enemies and that the Black and Chicano workers were their brothers.""

"“She was a heartfelt revolutionary of her time,” Donna Wilkinson, the widow of national civil liberties leader Frank Wilkinson, told The Times on Monday. “She was always so fiercely partisan for working people. Yes, of course, she cared about war and peace and women’s issues, but she was always concerned about working people.”"

"Anti-Semitism has become a major issue for the American people, and for all democratic mankind. In the pattern of imperialist reaction, anti-Semitism today looms ever larger, not only alongside of anti-Communism, anti-Sovietism, anti-unionism, anti-alienism, and anti-Negroism, but in a kind of special relationship to these other elements: Negroes, aliens, union men, the Soviets, and Communists are all in some degree tarred by reaction as Jewish or as the dupes of the Jews. Every reactionary movement today is itself anti-Semitic, or is allied with anti-Semites; on the other hand, the more consistent a progressive movement is, the more it makes the fight against anti-Semitism a prominent part of its program of action. No anti-Semite can be in any sense progressive now; no progressive can for any reason compromise with anti-Semitism."

"As Marxists, we stress the need of bringing the mask for privilege and the mask for frustration into their proper relationship. In this way the ruling class can be shown to be exploiting those it frustrates by diverting their resentment onto a scapegoat who is innocent of frustrating them and whose sacrificial slaughter, therefore, cannot release them from their frustration."

"It helps one keep one's balance to remember that there are other important problems clamoring for action...just the other week one of my Negro neighbors had her brother come home, discharged from the Army for medical reasons. He told his sister something which helps me maintain a proper perspective and relative sense of values. Her brother had been stationed in Alabama. In this Army camp there was a group of war prisoners, Germans. On Saturday nights these German war prisoners, properly protected, of course, by guards, would be escorted to the Alabama town for an American Saturday night "in town." But the Negro troops stationed there were not allowed, either escorted or under their own power, to go to town in Alabama on a Saturday night. Since hearing this story I have been thinking that surely there is nothing that can be done to one man at Sing Sing, either in two years or a year and a half or in any time that you may commute the sentence to, that can be quite as vicious, quite as brutalizing, quite as demoralizing as that which almost a half million Negro soldiers face in the armed forces or that which so many millions face in civilian life that is not yet entirely civilized."

"An active conscience is a formidable thing."

"Words must be backed by deeds."

"the entire commercial press of our nation is not the "free" press it loudly claims to be that it is, rather, the principal means yet devised by the owners of the giant newspaper industry for dominating the public mind."

"From the founding of our nation there has been a continual, many-angled struggle between these who would sacrifice the public need to their private wills and fortunes, and those who have fought to extend the boundaries of the public interest."

"The finance-capitalists who dominate American life are not Jews (Morgan, Rockefeller, DuPonts, Ford, etc.), and the number of Jewish proletarians has vastly increased. Yet, despite these facts, anti-Semitism has taken root in this country, and is now being organized on a greater scale than ever before. This organized anti-Semitism, furthermore, is more and more openly being used as a siphon to divert what are essentially anti-capitalist feelings among the people into channels that will serve only to fasten the hold of capitalism upon them, and capitalism, at that, in its most rabid, its fascist, form. The way to wipe out anti-Semitism coincides in large part, therefore, with the way to eliminate economic exploitation. And the way to wipe out the organized anti-Semitism that the American fascist forces are now fostering coincides with the way to check and crush fascism. Only socialism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, can eliminate the roots of anti-Semitism. And only the people's front, based on the trade unions and uniting the oppressed middle classes of city and country, can crush the fascists' attempt to organize anti-Semitism along lines of violence and vigilanteism. It is, therefore, very encouraging to note that practically all of the contributors to this symposium agree on these propositions: that anti-Semitism has economic roots, and can be uprooted only by some form of socialism; and that anti-Semitism now is a phase of fascism and must be fought as such, through unity with all progressive forces. It is noteworthy that all agree that the time has come to fight anti-Semitism, and considerable scorn is directed against those who preach passivity as a way of mollifying the anti-Semites."

"It is because the forces of national unity in this country, under the great social discipline of a just war, have grown so strong that they are in a position, together with the other United Nations, to administer the final crushing blows to Germany and Japan that the anti-Semites are resorting to the methods of desperation to disrupt this unity. We become really stronger; they become desperate and ferocious, but essentially weaker. Fascism itself has proved to be ferocious but unstable...let us not mistake their panic-stricken thrashings for real strength."

"To lead for the common good is to undermine the effectiveness of anti-Semitic propaganda."

"The main principle of a democracy is that the rights of any one group, be it minority or majority, are connected with the rights of all groups."

"Sometimes we Jews are afraid to act openly either in behalf of others or in the specific resistance to anti-Semitism. Some of us are still ridden by the psychology of fear. We have a habit of "dignified" and "long-suffering" retreat. But there is more dignity and less suffering in moving forward to victory. We must decide which we fear more: the victory, of Hitler and the anti-Semites, or the struggle against fascism and anti-Semitism. Is there really a choice, when Hitlerism offers us literal extermination? It is hard to win an ally, or develop an alliance, when we are ourselves retreating. Those who themselves fight with full courage help others decide to join them in the battle. But what is this talk of retreat or advance? The real alternative is survival or annihilation. Nothing less."

"Εducation is a war industry. Teachers, especially those involved in higher education, produce a direct war material. Our product is not the cannon, or the shell, or the dive bomber, or the dreadnaught. Ours is the even more basic material-the target. Without the target, the soldier on land, sea, or air, no war could get to the shooting stage."

"the capitalist press boiling everything in the timely caldrons of hysteria"

"the war makers have tried for more than a year to persuade the American people and the American college student to become enthusiastic targets in the war, and, having failed, must now resort to extraordinary methods of intimidation and terror."

"Such students and such teachers are obviously to be regarded as a menace to reaction and its domestic and foreign policy. They have no great enthusiasm for the war. Too many of them have the habit of thinking independently, of acting in concert, of valuing democracy as a way of living rather than as a way of talking. They are organized. Any fascist, any open-shop saboteur of democracy, any labor spy could write a plan of attack for reaction, given this situation. Red-bait. Attack the union as Red-dominated. Use a few "liberals" to lend respectability to the smear. Gag the students by preventing them from hearing speakers of their own choice. Fire some of the most active teachers and trade unionists. Scare the rest. If they don't scare that easily, pin a criminal charge on one of them; if the others still don't scare, at least the charge will shake off the fence onto the side of reaction some who still stubbornly said the issue was academic freedom. These are the tactics, these are the slogans, this is the reasoning laid bare-of growing American fascism trying to coordinate its free school system."

"I studied the students' problems; I did not try to suggest solutions; I tried only to have them develop courage and confidence in the fact that our people, who have solved so many problems, can solve this one, too."

"I have seen the union transform individuals, your Honor, young men, middle-aged men, who had been very good teachers, very good scholars, who apparently had abilities that were never to be realized within the academic walls. Not everybody could become the head of a department and exhibit his administrative ability. Here in the union they became executives; they became committee members; they began to learn how to work together, and in a college it is important because scholarship in our community sets a price upon individuality, not so much upon cooperation with others. They began to learn how to work together, how to argue things out, how to settle differences, rise above individualities and beyond pettiness. I was not the only one that noticed character change, character development and growth; that, of course, had its effect upon every relationship these men went into, whether it was in the classroom, at a department meeting, or outside in public life."

"Our schools are being attacked. I hope that changed tempers and changed atmospheres, changes which, perhaps, we had little to do with, will have some bearing. There was a time when the President of our country rebuked the Dies committee for what he called its "sordid procedure." There was a time when the President of the Board of Higher Education rebuked the Dies committee for its attacks on the College. I hope the times are becoming favorable for similar truthful and courageous observations of opinion on the functioning of the Rapp-Coudert committee"

"I wish your Honor or deputies of your Honor could have gone into the college halls and gotten some of the men, some of the men who are not in any way connected with this particular situation, gotten them to describe the atmosphere now. It is what it was in 1928, where, in the faculty dining room, intelligent men did not discuss intelligent things, because they did not dare, your Honor. They discussed road maps, roads, the weather, because there was no confidence that if they discussed more serious things, whether they should be Democrats or Republicans for instance, that it might not redound to their academic disadvantage. In more recent years, the faculty, as a whole, has faced its own problems more courageously. It has given freer rein to its ability, to its intellectual curiosity, expressed its conviction. Now a pall, an intellectual pall, is settling upon the college. People do not want to be seen speaking to other people, although they are personal friends, for fear that somebody will say, "Well, so and so doesn't talk to the right people about the right things." That is not an atmosphere in which a college can flourish. My sympathy goes out to the students who have to sit before teachers who will be afraid to answer questions that will be put to them-because the students will put questions and the teachers will be afraid to answer them, not often because they do not know the answers, but because they do. Is that an atmosphere in which a college-the largest municipally supported college in the world-can such a college flourish in such an atmosphere?"

"Some men buckle under these pressures; some men and women will do anything-perhaps not understanding the consequences, not sufficiently understanding them-to realize what it is that is forcing them in this direction. They will do anything for security. They will do anything for a permanent position when they are hanging on by the skin of their teeth year after year, teaching three courses in the evening session, and so on."

"Writing in 1982 about his time in prison in the 1940s, Morris described his determination, “as a way of fighting the system, to make the most of my time there, because if there is anything I hate it is to waste time — our most precious possession...I had valued democracy, democratic rights, before I was imprisoned. I was one of those who took almost literally Lenin’s hyperbolic cry that ‘Socialist democracy is a thousand times more democratic than bourgeois democracy.’ I believed it as a True Believer. So not a thousand; let it be a hundred, or ten times. That it could turn out in practice to be less democratic than bourgeois democracy in countries calling themselves socialist... was an experience that came late and sadly. If my vision of socialism now stresses democratic rights, forms and institutions as the essence of socialism, my prison experience laid a basis for a perception that was slowly, slowly, to mature.""

"Morris U. Schappes embodied an amazing combination of stubbornness and open-mindedness, historical consciousness, and future vision. His dedication to this magazine was fierce and sacrificial, and he cultivated tremendous enthusiasm and loyalty among its readers by dint of his honesty, his analytical powers, and his consistent dedication to progressive ideals."

"In his column, “The Editor’s Diary,” Morris developed a very intimate journalistic voice in which he reported on books, plays, films and events in the progressive Jewish movement and engaged in several noteworthy controversies, including a spirited historical defense of American Jewish responses to the Holocaust and several fascinating commentaries about solidarity and tensions between American Jews and African Americans."

"We are entering a new period in the history of the American melting pot. Immigration has stopped, for one thing, and assimilation has begun. A bigger factor, however, is the great social change going on in America, a process that inevitably lines up the poor against the money-bags, the trade unionists against the exploiters, the men who battle for human rights against those who fight for property rights. Race lines vanish in such a conflict; the class issue cuts through everything. Even the Negro question is affected and will finally be settled as this fight goes on; and this question is surely the touchstone of all racial problems in America."

"This bourgeois form of art for art's sake is no longerworthy of one's comment or attack. It has only one useful purpose that I can still see: it numbs the minds of the exploiters. Let them continue to support it and be stultified."

"If Hitler consolidates his power we will see a world reaction infinitely worse than that which followed the events of 1848. Every sign of the faintest liberalism amongst the middle class intellectuals will be drowned in blood. The workers will be massacred, terrorized, forced into a medieval serfdom. It is war-time. We must close ranks or be annihilated. Hitlerism will spread over Europe and sweep America. Unless we unite. Unless there is a united front of all the workingclass parties and liberal groups. The Socialists and liberals may form such a front, leaving out the Communists. They may piously ignore the massacre of Communists, deeming themselves more respectable and hence safer. But this is a form of suicide, for Mr. Villard will find himself consigned to the hangman by an American Hitler as swiftly as any Communist. Every anti-fascist is needed in this united front. There must be no base factional quarrels. Leaders who stand in the way of a united front should be swept aside by the rank and file. We are faced with the death of the whole workingclass movement. We cannot waste time. We cannot quibble. How can anyone underestimate this thing? But I feel an apathy in America, a failure to react to the events in Germany that is appalling. Forward to the united front! There need be no hypocrisy or ignoring of basic differences. Each party and each group can retain its individuality. But at once! Let us unite to fling back Hitlerism and crush it forever!"

"Without an understanding of the economic basis of war, no one can be its determined or effective opponent. Sentimental appeals will not hold back a nation inflamed by patriotic lies. Only the man who understands clearly that he is being asked to die for J. P. Morgan's investments abroad, or the markets of the oil and machinery trusts, will be immune to the customary lies about small nations, enemy atrocities, or democracy. That is why it is so necessary to spread a knowledge of Marxian economies; that is why it is so necessary to maintain a clear-cut Marxian platform in politics, based on the realities of the class war. Prepare for the next war! Prepare by studying Marx and Lenin, by studying the Russian Revolution. Prepare to fight Wall Street, instead of dying to protect its wealth. Inoculate yourself against the liberals who will want to lead you into another capitalist war for whatever holy and subtle reason. Prepare against the Walter Lippmanns, the Rabbi Stephen Wises, the Woodrow Wilsons, Spargoes, Bohns, Scheidemanns, Eberts, Kropotkins, Albert Thomases, Arthur Hendersons, of the next war. They are in your midst now; ask them what they will do, SPECIFICALLY, when the nation is mobilized. Prepare."

"War may have depended at times in the feudal past on the whim of emperors and kings. Today it is a respectable part of Big Business. It is as premeditated as a selling campaign by a large corporation. It is the last resort of national salesmanship."

"The idea of money is so dominant in this country that anyone not part of money is made to feel ashamed."

"I have chosen the Communist discipline. Because Communism projects into the future, and not into the past, as does Fascismo, which is only a defense corps trying to save the rottenness of the past."

"There will be another World War soon. Everything we think and do in the next decade will fall within that shadow, as Walt Whitman's generation fell under the Civil War. There is no escape; there is no alternative for the writer as for other men, but struggle or suicide. One will be forced into an attitude. I prefer life. It is life that has created the Communist movement, with a philosophy so tragic and honest that it can face the thought of the next world war, prepare for it, and go on building. No prayers, or pieties, or hocus-pocus of Fascist rhetoric but the habit of facing every day the hardest facts of life; building with them, seeing beyond them, using them for a great new objective. That is the way to write well, and it is Communism."

"The dark ages had returned; modern thought was again burning in the flames of a new inquisition, the Jews again afflicted with the yellow badge of shame."

"Hitler is a demagogue who has falsified history. He succeeds because his followers are too ignorant to know that he lies. The great mass of Jews in the world today are not millionaire bankers, but paupers and workers. I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be told of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto. Yiddish literature is saturated with the ghetto melancholy and poverty. And Jewish bankers are fascists everywhere. Hitler has received their support, both with money and ideas. Some of his most important secret conferences were held in the home of a Jewish banker. They gave large sums to his party before he came to power. Hitler's whole program is to save the banking and profiteering capitalist system. The attack on the Jews is merely a piece of demagogy, to throw the hungry German masses off the trail of their real enemy. No, every Jew is not a millionaire. The majority of Jews belongs to the working-class and to the bankrupt lower middle class. It is natural that in the present hour so many of them are to be found in the Socialist, Communist and trade union ranks. Jewish bankers are fascists; Jewish workers are radicals; the historic class division is true among the Jews as with any other race."

"It has become necessary now in America to fight against this great fascist lie. Recently, groups of anti-Semitic demagogues have appeared in this country. They are like Hitler, telling the hungry American people that capitalism is Jewish, and that an attack on the Jews is the best way of restoring prosperity. What folly! What criminal deception and bloody fraud! And there are signs that this oldest of swindles will grow in America. The defense of the Jewish race against these fascist liars and butchers has become one of the most necessary tasks for every liberal and radical. This is not only a problem for Jews to meet; it has become the problem of the workers and farmers whose hunger the fascists try to appease with the empty husk of anti-Semitism."

"Mike Gold's initiation into the radical movement occurred in 1914 when he blundered into an unemployment demonstration in Union Square, listened to the "rebel girl" Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and bought a copy of The Masses. Between 1915, when he contributed his first poem to Eastman's magazine, and 1921, when he joined the editorial staff of The Liberator, Gold lived the wandering and exciting life of the Bohemian-anarchist artist. He wrote three one-act plays for the Provincetown Players and spent a summer with the happy and hard-drinking group at the Cape. In New York, after attending rehearsals at the Provincetown Playhouse, he would join Eugene O'Neill and anarchist friends at a saloon on the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, the "Hell Hole," and listen to O'Neill recite "The Hound of Heaven." Dorothy Day, a "rebel girl" of the Village and, later, the much-admired and selfless editor of the Catholic Worker, remembers at this time that she and Gold were reading Tolstoy together. "He used to make fun of my religious spirit," she wrote later, "but he himself was in sympathy with the Christianity expressed by Tolstoi, a religion without churches or a priesthood. Mike had a religious upbringing in his home on the East Side and liked to sing Yiddish folksongs and Hebrew hymns.""

"Gold is important to recover because he is one of dozens, hundreds of writers whose legacy and output was silenced by the Red Scare and Cold War. Gold’s project was to create a working-class literature written for, by, and about working-class people, and Gold understood that a working-class literature would also have to be a radical literature, and a racial literature. And he understood that such a project required conflict with a literary establishment. It would mean a literary class war."

"Indeed, I had entered the red conspiracy in the vain belief that it was the way to a "new, better and superior" world system of society. Ten years later, thoroughly disillusioned, I abandoned communism. The experiences of those years in "outer darkness" are like a horrible nightmare. I saw communism in all its naked cruelty, ruthlessness and utter contempt of Christian attributes and passions. And, too, I saw the low value placed upon human life, the total lack of respect for the dignity of man, the betrayal of trust, the terror of the Secret Police and the bloody hand of the assassin, during and since, those fateful years when I embraced communism."

"Being a Negro top communist, I was placed on the National Negro Commission, an important sub-committee of the National Committee of the Communist Party. On this Commission, which was created on direct orders from Moscow to facilitate the subversion of the Negroes, I began to realize the full implications of how the Negro is used as a political dupe by the Kremlin hierarchy. Under the guise of "unity of black and white in the struggle," several top white communists, such as James S. Allen, Elizabeth Lawson, the late Robert "Bob" Minor, and George Blake Charney were placed on the National Negro Commission. These white communists wielded more power than the nominal Negro heads of the Commission. In a word, they are like white overseers. Every Negro member was aware of the fact that these white overseers constituted the eyes, the ears and the voice of the Kremlin. Moreover, these white overseers are the surest functional guarantee of the maintenance of the hierarchical authoritarian control of the Kremlin over their Negro lick-spittles directing the conspiracy among Negroes in America."

"In this connection, I observed how white women communists are used as political prostitutes, cohabiting with high-level Negro communists in order to spy on them. Through such intimate relations, these white women communists are able to elicit information pertaining to family background, sources of income, marital difficulties, arrests, convictions, opinions on communist policy and communist leadership. This information is invaluable to the red hierarchy in their relations with their Negro lickspittles. In top red circles, this is known as "bedroom politics.""

"White communist women are also used to maneuver top Negro reds into compromising positions that, if revealed, would result in public scandal or disgrace. In this way, the reds make these Negroes permanently subject to blackmail if they ever consider leaving the red movement. Moreover, this information is used to destroy the credibility of the defector, should he decide to fight the red conspiracy."

"Only after the order came from Moscow in the 1934–35 period to win over the Negro intellectual by deceptive flattery and adulation did the red's public attitude toward them change. The Kremlin concluded that these "superficial phonies" could serve the cause of Communism."

"A large number of Negro ministers are all for the Communists. Some are prominent and influential; others are "run of the mill." They in common believe that beating the racial drums is a short cut to prominence, money and the realization of personal ambitions even if the Negro masses are left prostrate and bleeding — expendables in the mad scramble for power."

"Abner W. Berry, columnist in The Daily Worker, official organ of the Communist Party, recently praised these ministers as fulfilling their "historic role," i.e., delivering the Negro into the hands of the Communists. Neither his pen nor his lips had such praise prior to the 1934-35 period. Then the Moscow line was clear. The resolution on the Negro Question stated: "In the work among the Negroes, special attention should be paid to the role played by the churches and preachers who are acting on behalf of American imperialism. The Party must conduct a continuous and carefully worked out campaign among the Negro masses, sharpened primarily against the preachers and the churchmen, who are the agents of the oppressors of the Negro race.""

"Application of the new line embarked the Communists on an era of outstanding success in infiltrating and penetrating the Negro Church. White ministers acting as missionaries, using the race angle as bait, aided in the cultivation of Negro ministers for work in the Red solar system of organizations. Bribery through gifts, paid lectures, flattery through long applause at staged rallies, favorable mention in the red controlled press were not the only methods employed to corrupt the Negro ministers. The use of sex and perversion as a means of political blackmail was an accepted red tactic."

"The new line went like this: Jesus, the carpenter, was a worker like the Communists. He was against the "money changers," the "capitalists," the "exploiters" of that day. That is why he drove them from the temple. The Communists are the modern day fighters against the capitalists or money changers. If Jesus were living today, he would be persecuted like the Communists who seek to do good for the common people."

"Gilbert Green, one of the top Reds in this country, reported as follows: "For example in the South we have more than 300 members who are also members of church youth organizations—especially the Baptist Young Peoples Union. In this district (Alabama)...where possible we should build...units in the Church Youth organizations. Why? Because in the South, especially for the Negro youth, the church is the center of cultural and social activity. It is here that we must work. By building our units in the church organizations we can also improve our work under the illegal conditions, as it will be easier to work in the church organizations. In Alabama there are certain places in which we can in a short while take over the church organizations of youth, under our leadership, and these can become legal covers for our work in the South.""

"Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America. During the confusion, demoralization and panic would set in. Then finally, the reds say: "Workers stop work, many of them seize arms by attacking arsenals. Many had armed themselves before...Street fights become frequent. Under the leadership of the Communist Party the workers organize Revolutionary Committees to be in command of the uprising. Armed workers...seize the principal government offices, invade the residences of the President and his Cabinet members, arrest them, declare the old regime abolished, establish their own power....""

"What if one or five million Negroes die in an abortive attempt to establish a Negro republic? Is not the advance of the cause worth it? A Communist is not a sentimentalist. He does not grieve over the loss of life in the advancement of Communism."

"This plot to use the Negroes as the spearhead, or as expendables, was concocted by Stalin in 1928, nearly ten years after the formation of the world organization of Communism. Prior to this time, the periodic Moscow gatherings did little more than pass resolutions. Any credit for the change belongs, in the main, to a handful of Negro lick-spittles like James W. Ford, Harry Haywood, Otto Hall, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, and Otto Huiswood, to mention a few."

"During the three decades which have elapsed since the Sixth World Congress in Moscow, the American Communist Party has conducted many campaigns and formed and infiltrated a large number of organizations among Negroes. From the bloody gun battles at Camp Hill, Alabama (1931), to the present integration madness, the heavy hand of communism has moved, stirring up racial strife, creating confusion, hate and bitterness so essential to the advancement of the red cause."

"Few men want the medicine the reds gave the late Senator Joseph McCarthy which the reds boast is the best cure for militant anti-Communists."

"Posing as a "friend of the Negro," they, under the guise of a campaign for Negro rights, set race against race in the cold-blooded struggle for power. Their hypocrisy and the falsity of their claims are clearly revealed in a number of instances."

"The reds have deliberately twisted and warped the thinking of those intellectual pygmies who lead the "Freedom by '63" campaign by sending them after quick solutions of a centuries' old problem that has never been solved anywhere in the world. Obvious even to the most ignorant is the fact that all people are prejudiced. No one is free of it. Prejudice, in one form or another, has existed almost as long as the human family. They arise out of the complex differences of race, nationality, religion, economic, social and cultural standing."

"It is then no accident that the N.A.A.C.P. is dubbed "The National Association for the Agitation of Colored People." The record speaks for itself. Millions for agitation; not one cent for those things that win the respect and acclaim of other races and national groups."

"Therefore, we may readily assume that any damage done to our prestige abroad should be at the feet of the N.A.A.C.P. and the reds who started the trouble. What is significant is that those who spread the lie that violence erupted because Negro children are denied an education have not repudiated it. Any confusion or misunderstanding created abroad has not been cleared up by the N.A.A.C.P. leadership. At no time have they admitted that no Negro in the United States is denied an education. And, too, they have not admitted that not every Negro wants an education, for reasons better known to himself. That accounts for many Negroes not being able to read or write. Moreover, there are free schools open both day and night for all those who want an education."

"It is also implied that a Negro child is handicapped in his studies unless he is sitting beside a white child. What could be more nonsensical or ridiculous? It is a sad commentary on the ability of the Negro child to say that he cannot properly study or that he will develop harmful complexes if he does not sit beside a white child. By what quirk of reasoning does one conclude that sitting beside a white child will help a Negro child make the grade? Experience shows that a student's success is determined by how much attention, time and effort he is willing to put into his studies."

"In New York, for example, many Negro Junior High and High School graduates are outrageously poor in spelling, writing, reading and mathematics. Yet they attended integrated schools."

"At the root of all the present racial trouble is interference in the internal affairs of Southern States by people not at all interested in an amicable settlement of any problems arising between Negro and white Americans."

"Mr. James R. Mitchell, Secretary of Labor, reported that the Department of Labor in a recent survey found that: "Purchasing power of the Negroes was more than $17,000,000,000 and that a third of the Negro population owned their own homes. Negro wage earners, he said, make four and a half times what they earned in 1940.""

"In the meantime the Negro is the sacrificial lamb — the innocent victim of the widespread racial hate which the leftists are creating. The energizing of race hate is an asset to the red cause. The more, the merrier, so long as it erupts in cross burnings, threats, loss of jobs, refusal of loans, boycotts, bombings, fist fights, beatings and shootings."

"Indeed the spectre of the "Modern Carpet Bagger" haunts the South. Reds, NAACPers, do-gooders and other "missionaries" follow in the footsteps of those Northerners who for narrow, selfish, personal or political reasons meddled in the affairs of the South in the period immediately following the Civil War. Like their predecessors, these modern-day Carpet Baggers create only mischief for they have no true interest in the South. A check of the record of these modern-day Carpet Baggers will show that most of them are either Communists or persons who have been, or are now, associated with the Communist cause as a fronter, endorser, or fellow traveler."

"[V]ociferous Negro intellectuals, along with the reds, through their impractical, unrealistic, alien behavior, turn race relations into a shambles. Every Negro who opposes integration and the N.A.A.C.P. becomes a traitor or an "Uncle Tom." Every white person taking a similar stand is branded a "criminal" and "outside of the law." The fact that courts have been known to reverse themselves and that under our system of government every American has the right to protest and oppose any ruling considered onerous or prejudicial is ignored. Stupidly, they go about their business of forcing everybody to conform or be damned, thus building up fires of resentment that will require the work of centuries to extinguish. Already, under the guise of "struggling for Negro rights," they have created all the explosive material for racial violence by making impossible demands, resisting sane and just decisions, opposing compromise and adjustment and demanding that everything must be done forthwith or not at all. They have no love for their own people. They have no love for America. Naturally, they get the Kremlin's support and approval. Feeling frustrated and inferior, they run to communism and civil disobedience in their folly. They play Moscow's game and they deserve whatever red reward that is due them."