rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." —So pervasive is this bourgeois notion of individualism that most of the workers have not experienced collective work. —In this country the anarchists seem to feel that if they just express themselves individually and tend to ignore the limitations imposed on them, without leadership and without discipline they can oppose the very disciplined, organized, reactionary state. This is not true. They will be oppressed as long as imperialism exists. You cannot oppose a system such as this without organization that's even more disciplined and dedicated than the structure you're opposing. —World history is made by minorities whenever their numerical minority incorporates the majority of will and determination. —Socialists might conquer, but not socialism, which would perish in the moment of its adherents' triumph. We are tempted to speak of this process as a tragicomedy in which the masses are content to devote all their energies to effecting a change of masters.
The organization of the Party takes the place of the Party itself, the Central Committee takes the place of the organization; and finally the leader takes the place of the Central Committee. —The Bureau makes political decisions, moves in a political way, and moves for victory, and it would be insane for anyone to expect leadership to organize around mandates and drop their own politics. —The principle that one vanguard inevitably succeeds to another, and the law deduced from that principle that leadership is, as it were, a preordained form of the common life of great social aggregates, far from conflicting with or replacing the materialist conception of history, completes that conception and reinforces it. There is no essential contradiction between the doctrine that history is the record of a continued series of class struggles and die doctrine that class struggles invariably culminate in the creation of new vanguards which undergo fusion with the old. —History must, therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard; the real production of life is primeval history, while the truly historical is separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial. With this die relation of man to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created. The exponents of this conception of history have consequently been able to see in history the political actions of princes and States.
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