Communists From Germany

"Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it."

"The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies."

"If you fight you might lose, if you don’t you have already lost."

"What if they gave a war and no one came? Then the war will come to you."

"There is a wonderful sentence, a statement, by one of Bertolt Brecht's characters, he says: "I am that man that goes around with a brick in his hand, to show the world how his house was." And that's the way I feel about my books in a way, that they are my bricks. I can show people what I believe my world was, so I've not lost it."

"Yesterday, a long conversation in Brecht’s sickroom about my essay "The Author as Producer." Brecht thought the theory I develop in the essay — that the attainment of technical progress in literature eventually changes the function of art forms (hence also of the intellectual means of production) and is therefore a criterion for judging the revolutionary function of literary works — applies to artists of only one type, the writers of the upper bourgeoisie, among whom he counts himself. "For such a writer," he said, "there really exists a point of solidarity with the interests of the proletariat: it is the point at which he can develop his own means of production. Because he identifies with the proletariat at this point, he is proletarianized — completely so — at this same point, i.e. as a producer. And his complete proletarianization at this one point establishes his solidarity with the proletariat all along the line.""

"I will quote Brecht: “I’m on the side of the people.”"

"I turned to Brecht and asked him why, if he felt the way he did about Jerome and the other American Communists, he kept on collaborating with them, particularly in view of their apparent approval or indifference to what was happening in the Soviet Union. ... Brecht shrugged his shoulders and kept on making invidious remarks about the American Communist Party and asserted that only the Soviet Union and its Communist Party mattered. ... But I argued ... it was the Kremlin and above all Stalin himself who were responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of the opposition and their dependents. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him. 'What are you saying?' I asked. He calmly repeated himself, 'The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' ... I was stunned by his words. 'Why? Why?' I exclaimed. All he did was smile at me in a nervous sort of way. I waited, but he said nothing after I repeated my question. I got up, went into the next room, and fetched his hat and coat. When I returned, he was still sitting in his chair, holding a drink in his hand. When he saw me with his hat and coat, he looked surprised. He put his glass down, rose, and with a sickly smile took his hat and coat and left. Neither of us said a word. I never saw him again."

"I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again."

"I've been thinking about Brecht's comment on creating apolitical art: it's like painting a still life on a sinking ship, he said."

"I began to write poetry in English before I could properly speak or write. Since I wrote free verse in ordinary speech, patterning my style after Bertolt Brecht, and getting effects by sharply contrasting images and striking sound patterns, I could achieve some sort of effect with the most primitive means."

"In my conscious effort to become an American writer, I gave up my German literary models-Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun, Karl Kraus. I read all the O. Henry Award-winning short-story collections of the past decade, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner. Richard Wright's work struck me with elemental force-he spoke from the gut in a way I wished I could speak, but that seemed utterly unobtainable to me at that time. Carl and I read Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Walt Whitman aloud to each other. The only German author I was not willing to give up was Bertolt Brecht, whose work on the emigration experience spoke to me directly and powerfully. I was determined that Carl must learn to appreciate Brecht as I did. I developed the ability to do simultaneous translation, reading in German and speaking in English, but I never did get Brecht's poetic quality right until much later, when I translated some of his work in earnest and with care, in writing...Brecht wrote eloquently about the cost paid by the writer forced to abandon his language."

"In 1935 German communist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote an essay, "Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties," about the challenges facing writers during a time of political repression and manipulation. He said, "The writer who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties." These were "the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons." Brecht wrote, "We must tell the truth about evil conditions to those for whom the conditions are worst, and we must also learn the truth from them. We must address not only people who hold certain views, but people who, because of their situation, should hold these views....Even the hangmen can be addressed when the payment for hanging stops, or when the work becomes too dangerous." If people don't hold the views we expect their lives to generate, we need to listen more deeply, listen to the layers of stories underlying the ones they tell, until we find the layer where our truths meet. Finally, Brecht speaks of cunning, the skill to evade repression but also to work around people's resistance to the truth, to make intentional choices about whether and how to encode our messages, based entirely on what will be most effective. Some radicals insist on using the clichéd language of bloody chains and groaning masses, phrases that make them feel militant but limit their audience. Sometimes it's more effective to say "profit-driven society" instead of "capitalism," "making war on people to steal their stuff" instead of "imperialism." Brecht asked writers to act based on the results we want to achieve, not just on what makes us feel good in the moment."

"As a youth I enjoyed — indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered — the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system — which is to say by the accrual of wealth — house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America."

"this sequence has that title coming from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright and poet, a revolutionary playwright and poet, I should add, who wrote a poem in which he said, “What kind of times are these, when it seems almost a crime to talk about trees, because it means keeping silent about so many evil deeds.” And so, I called the whole sequence “What Kind of Times Are These.” And in it, I was just playing with the sense of what it was like—what it is like to be alive in this country in the 1990s—the encroaching power of the capitalist economy, the denial of any kind of counterbalancing past, the wiping out of history, and also the need to find happiness and pleasure in the midst of such dark times, and how that can carry you through to be aware, as open-eyed as you can of what is going on in your time, and at the same time, as Rosa Luxemburg advised, to seize every beautiful cloud and every joyful moment. And so, this little sequence of poems came out of that kind of musing."

"I love Brecht and Fassbinder, of course."

"But something's missing (Aber etwas fehlt)."

"People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart."

"Engels always considered himself a junior partner, and so, without doubt, he was. But that does not lessen his role. Had he not been the junior partner, much for which his senior partner is known would not have been done."

"That the Materialistic Socialists will improve H. [History] for the poor. Their best writer, Engels, made known the errors and the horrors of our Factory System."

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"Comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning."

"From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes."

"You cannot conquer an awakened people. You cannot Prussianize Belgium and France. You cannot eradicate the teachings of Marx and Engels from the minds of hundreds of thousands of German Socialists. Surely they would find some way of uniting in spirit and in deed with the comrades of other nations in case of such an invasion on the part of a government which they had always understood and denounced."

"Engels's analysis has faced criticism in the twentieth century, both for its anthropological inaccuracy and for its theoretical confusion. Simone de Beauvoir found the materialist position inadequate to describe the nature of female subordination. "Historical materialism takes for granted facts that call for explanations.... It cannot provide solutions for the problems we have raised, because these concern the whole man and not that abstraction: Homo economicus." Simone de Beauvoir argued that woman's oppression is at bottom not based on economic factors, for "if the human consciousness had not included the original category of the Other and an original aspiration to dominate the Other, the invention of the bronze tool could not have caused the oppression of woman." More recently Ann Lane has attacked not materialism but Engels's inconsistency in applying it. She has argued that Engels mistakenly believed "that the responsibilities of home and family, and the economic ties that bind them together, are not an important part of what establishes their cohesion, that society can remove a vital function of an institution in order to perfect it. Socialist society will strip the family of most of its traditional jobs, but the family itself, in its pristine state, untouched by history or reality, shall remain.""

"Today in Korea—in Southeast Asia—in Latin America and the West Indies, in the Middle East—in Africa, one sees tens of millions of long oppressed colonial peoples surging toward freedom. What courage—what sacrifice—what determination never to rest until victory!...And arrayed against them, the combined powers of the so-called Free West, headed by the greedy, profit-hungry, war-minded industrialists and financial barons of our America. The illusion of an “American Century” blinds them for the immediate present to the clear fact that civilization has passed them by—that we now live in a people’s century—that the star shines brightly in the East of Europe and of the world. Colonial peoples today look to the Soviet Socialist Republics...One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future."

"Friedrich Engels once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization."

"Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone. The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward which will assure to society all the products it needs. In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members."

"What will be the consequences of the ultimate disappearance of private property? Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished. There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past."

"It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range."

"By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries."

"When all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain."

"Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country's productive forces."

"Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat."

"In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat."

"The abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary. ... The outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat."

"So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the and extending the forces of production – so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society's productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development."

"Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. Private property has not always existed. When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order."

"The abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand."

"Since the by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the of goods."

"Abolish competition and replace it with association."

"Big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions. We see with the greatest clarity: (i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and (ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether."

"It makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all."

"Big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter."

"Everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital. Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength. Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian social revolution."

"Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of . In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters – that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the , and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government."

"The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way."

"Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the , and their representative, the . The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital."

"Big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class."

"The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian."