Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
The first rays of a new dawn are just now reaching the horizon. Some of us are only now stirring; others have been awake through the deep and starless night. The great masses still slumber. If you are one of those who have turned to see the light of a new red star, it is your duty to go among your recumbent siblings and rouse them to action.
Although the objective conditions exist to consolidate the proletarian class as class (a class-in-itself) in the United States imperialist bloc, the subjective conditions do not. The working classes are divided, scattered, and unconscious. They have been put to sleep, pacified, and anesthetized by the cunning of the ruling class and its many lackeys. Even petit-bourgeois professionals are watching their class-position crumble beneath them. The machinery of empire is breaking down.
Reading this now makes you an outlier among the working classes of the imperialist centers. You cannot afford to be complacent. Something shook you awake; do not go back to sleep.
Many forces tell you not to act. They weave a siren song of false complacency. From the right, they tell you that you can’t possibly have an effect on the great movement of history, that things are too big and you are too small. From the left, they tell you that you aren’t equipped, or you don’t know enough yet, or you are from the wrong background to be of assistance. Ignore them.
No one changes history alone, but together we can alter the destiny of peoples.
If you feel as if you have not studied enough, your first action should be to study! Find others to study with you. Learn how to organize together, then take the next step.
Don’t let the size of the task ahead overwhelm you. The social revolution is possible; the complex systems erected by history that make up our current society can be analyzed. If they can be known, studied, and understood, they can be destroyed! It is through conscious analysis, the application of science to socialism, that we can work toward our collective liberation. That same science allows us to build a future society, one without class and national oppression. We can, for the first time, consciously design the society in which we live, rather than simply inherit the rotten accretions of the past.
Work to expose the machinery of the state for what it is! Lenin said that, “[w]hen we do that (and we must and can do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the peasants and the authors, are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be filled with an irresistible desire to react.” (emphasis added).
No one is precluded from working for liberation, regardless of their socio-economic background. If you have economic advantages, if you’re from the “wrong” class, if you’re from an oppressor nation, then you must spend time purging yourself of the ideological standpoint of that class, of that nation. In fact, you have resources you can put at the disposal of the revolutionary movement — but you cannot do that alone!Do not accept inaction. Go forth. Study. Organize. Act. Arise!
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