about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimaeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; to take up a critical attitude toward them; to knock them out of their heads; and existing reality will collapse. —There is no socialist perspective for our country without the clear understanding that a socialist-conscious working class is an essential precondition for fundamental changes in the social relations. —Consciousness can be important in bringing about new materia! conditions that might be more conducive to more basic and far-reaching social change. —Life is determined by consciousness, not consciousness by life. —The struggle for mass democracy against the illusions of representative government and benevolent bureaucracy cannot be abandoned if the transition from reform to revolution in popular consciousness is to be secured. —Since the New Left considers conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Left declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the New Left has to fight only against these illusions of that consciousness. Since, according to their theory, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the New Left logically puts to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or revolutionary consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another interpretation.
strategy can no longer be based on material demands alone. Rather, it must be based on a more encompassing projection of the social and economic alternatives to the status quo. Briefly, we propose a strategy that posits, on the one hand, a critique of the reality of meaningless jobs, manipulated consumption and growing maldistribution of wealth, and on the other hand, a vision of the liberating potential of a fully automated, fully communist society. —The point here is not that the vanguard shall realize the impossibility of preserving the old order of things and the inevitability of its overthrow. The point is that the masses, the millions, shall understand this inevita-
57
