The choice that you face is that you either continue to be able to make a contribution to the struggle or not. Joe Slovo
I entered into this Revolution to contribute my mite to sustain the rights of states and prevent the consolidation of the government, and I am still a rebel ... no matter who may be in power. Joseph Brown
Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions. Edmund Burke
It is more pleasant and more useful to live through a revolution than to write about it. Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution afterword
Even before the revolution, and likewise after it, our thought was: immediately, or at any rate very quickly, a revolution will begin in other countries, in capitalistically more developed countries – or in the contrary case, we will have to perish. Vladimir Lenin, address to Teachers’ Conference 1919
The revolution of rising expectations has swept across the colonial world. Harlan Cleveland
All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution. Rosa Luxemburg
People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society, they take a stand for the surface modification of the old society. Our programme becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives. Italo Calvino, Italian novelist & short-story writer
After a revolution, you see the same men in the drawing-room, and within a week the same flatterers. George Savile, 1633-95, ‘Political, Moral and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections’, 1750
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the State. Albert Camus
Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic. Albert Camus
Women are at once the boldest and most unmanageable revolutionaries. Eamon de Valera
All civilisation has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution. Henry Havelock Ellis, Little Essays of Love and Virtue, 1922
All revolutions are spiritual at the source. All my activities have the sole purpose of achieving a union of hearts. Vinoba Bhave
The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young India. Crap it out and read. Instead of which, they’re all sitting in front of colour TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a non-violent revolution. Revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. Malcolm X
The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action. Malcolm X
It certainly was no good just thinking about a new society, or trying to attract others to it by example. Exploiters who amassed their power and wealth by robbing workers were not sentimental or namby-pamby about it. They would hold on to their wealth and power, if they had to, by force. They would never surrender that power and wealth, however intellectually or morally unjustifiable it was. It was up to the exploited class – the working class – to seize the means of production in a revolution. No one could do it for them. Socialism could not be introduced by Utopians, dictators, benevolent or otherwise, or by reforming intellectuals and politicians. The first precondition for socialism was that the wealth of society had to be taken over by the workers ...
While reforms are carried out in the name of workers by someone from on high, the muck of ages sticks to them. The hierarchies created by exploitation encourage even the most degraded and exploited worker to seek someone else whom he can insult and bully as he himself is insulted and bullied. In such circumstances, workers will take pride in things of which there is nothing to be proud: the colour of their skin, their sex, nationality, birthplace or God. These are selected for them by custom, inheritance or superstition, and have nothing to do with their abilities or characters. They are the muck of ages. How are they to be shaken off? Is someone else to do it for the workers? Or should they do it themselves, by organising their producing power, their own strikes, demonstrations and protests? Paul Foot, The Case For Socialism ch1
In February 1917, the Russian workers and peasants rose again in another, even more furious revolution. The First World War had inflicted on them greater suffering than anywhere else in Europe. There seemed no end to the war, nor to the ruthless class policies of the Tsar and his advisers. In a trice, the February revolution overthrew forever the Tsarist tyranny. It was replaced by a provisional government which promised a parliament and continued the war. At the same time, workers, soldiers and peasants set up soviets on a far greater scale than in 1905.
In the ensuing tumultuous nine months, the two forms of power – the old state and the new soviets – operated side by side.
The provisional government, under its prime minister, Kerensky, staggered aimlessly under the huge burden of the war, which it was determined to continue. Kerensky was forced again and again into the policies which had been carried out by the Tsar. Quickly, the popularity of the provisional government started to disappear. The people, both in the cities and in the countryside, clamoured for more. This clamour was not often heard by the government. The anger and aspirations of the people, and especially of the working class, expressed itself in the political organisations which more closely represented them: the soviets.
When the soviets were first elected in February, they were dominated by the Social Revolutionaries, whose strength was in the countryside among the peasants, and the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party. The Mensheviks argued that the job of the soviets was to advise and pressurise the provisional government, not to replace it. They treated the soviets as sounding boards, glorified trade unions where people could express their opinions and pass them on to the real power: the provisional government. ibid. ch2
The Russian revolution was isolated. The working class which had made the revolution was almost entirely wiped out by war and famine. Of the three million adult workers in Russia, only 1.2 million remained in 1921, and many of those were driven out of the cities in search of food. Effectively the only revolutionary workers who were left were those who had taken over the reins of political power. The Bolsheviks still ruled, but there were no Bolshevik workers to maintain ‘control from below’ – the essence of the revolution. The inevitable happened quite quickly. The revolution perished. ibid. ch2
Revolution? Is that not a distant and even a ridiculous idea in the last decade of the 20th century? Is it not something which happened 200 years ago in France and 70 years ago in Russia, but is hardly even thinkable today?
The answer is that there have been as many revolutionary situations in the past twenty-five years as in any other quarter century in history. In France in 1968, for instance, there was a students’ revolt and a general strike which for an instant threatened one of the most powerful and complacent ruling classes in the world. In 1974 there was a revolution in Portugal. In 1979 there was a revolution in Iran. In 1981, as we have seen, the workers of Poland came within a whisker of bringing down the regime. In all these four cases, the whole structure of class power was in jeopardy. In each case, a new system of society, a socialist system, was made possible by the revolutionary actions of the masses.
In each case the masses were defeated. The revolutionary wave subsided, and society slid back into reaction. There was nothing inevitable about this. What was missing in all four upheavals was a strong organisation of socialists linked to the fighting spirit of the working class. ibid. ch6
Socialism is, and must always be, a revolutionary idea. Unless it means the transfer of economic power from a small, greedy and irresponsible elite to the democratic control of the majority it means nothing. Since this transfer will not willingly be conceded, it can take place only in a revolution. So socialists must be revolutionaries. They have to organise themselves and direct their propaganda in the only area where there is any real prospect of change: among the minority who are prepared to fight. Their success is measured not by their ideological purity, still less by their propensity to rant and hector, but by their ability to organise and encourage people who do not share all their ideas but who are ready to fight.
This minority may change from year to year, week to week. The dynamics of class society are always throwing up new struggles, usually in unexpected areas, where people who imagined themselves law-abiding and decent citizens suddenly find themselves indignantly fighting against the rulers they previously respected. The presence and organisation of socialists in such circumstances can be crucial to victory or defeat. The chief job of socialists is to spread and link the struggles across the boundaries of race, sex, religion and nation ...
Socialism means nothing unless it means control of society from below. There is no hope of achieving that socialism except by action from below. For most of the twentieth century the idea of socialism has been poisoned by people who pretend that it can be instituted from on high: by well-meaning parliamentarians or by blind or brutal Stalinists. Now the Labour parliamentarians, in their rush for votes, are rapidly abandoning the word ‘socialism’ – the idea itself they abandoned long ago. Stalinism is dead. The ‘growing wrath’ against a system which has brought the world to the rim of hell is everywhere: in furious strikes in South Korea, in courageous uprisings of the oppressed Palestinians in the Middle East, in a new impatient fury at the wrecking of the world’s environment, in anti-poll tax demonstrations all over Britain.