Quotes of the Month

"Socialism will not and cannot be created by decrees; nor can it be established by any government, however socialistic. Socialism must be created by the masses, by every proletarian. Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken. Only that is socialism, and only thus can socialism be created." -- Rosa Luxemburg, "Organizational Question of Social Democracy," in Selected Political Writings, edited and introduced by Dick Howard: New York and London, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 396-7.

"The fact is, however, that Social Democracy is not bound up with the organization of the working classes; rather, it is the very movement of the working class. Social Democratic centralism must, therefore, be of essentially other coin than the Blanquist. It can be nothing but the imperative summation of the will of the enlightened and fighting vanguard of the working class as opposed to its individual groups and members. This is, so to speak, a 'self-centralism' of the leading stratum of the proletariat; it is the rule of the majority within its own party organization." -- p.290

"If, with Lenin, we say that opportunism is the attempt to cripple the independent revolutionary class movement of the proletariat in order to make it useful to the power-hungry bourgeois intelligentsia, then in the beginning stages of the labor movement this goal can most easily be reached not through decentralization but precisely through rigid centralism. It is by extreme centralization that the still unclear proletarian movement can be delivered up to a handful of intellectuals." -- p. 301