Chris Burford wrote:
>What do marxists think of the attempts by imperialist governments to
>interfere in the internatl affairs of Austria?
The same thing we think of all such efforts. That is their business. Our
business is to mobilize the working class in a final showdown with the
murders and thieves of both the fascist and liberal parties. Our attitude
is uncompromising.
1. The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no
business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name.
Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single
passion for revolution.
2. The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only
in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to
the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and
customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their
implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order
to destroy them more speedily.
3. The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the
mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows only one
science: the science of destruction. For this reason, but only for this
reason, he will study mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps medicine.
But all day and all night he studies the vital science of human beings,
their characteristics and circumstances, and all the phenomena of the
present social order. The object is perpetually the same: the surest and
quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order.
4. The revolutionary despises public opinion. He despises and hates the
existing social morality in all its manifestations. For him, morality is
everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and
criminal is everything that stands in its way.
5. The revolutionary is a dedicated man, merciless toward the State and
toward the educated classes; and he can expect no mercy from them. Between
him and them there exists, declared or concealed, a relentless and
irreconcilable war to the death. He must accustom himself to torture.
6. Tyrannical toward himself, he must be tyrannical toward others. All the
gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude,
and even honor, must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and
singleminded passion for revolution. For him, there exists only one
pleasure, on consolation, one reward, one satisfaction -- the success of
the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim --
merciless destruction. Striving cold-bloodedly and indefatigably toward
this end, he must be prepared to destroy himself and to destroy with his
own hands everything that stands in the path of the revolution.
7. The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all sentimentality,
romanticism, infatuation, and exaltation. All private hatred and revenge
must also be excluded. Revolutionary passion, practiced at every moment of
the day until it becomes a habit, is to be employed with cold calculation.
At all times, and in all places, the revolutionary must obey not his
personal impulses, but only those which serve the cause of the revolution.
>From Catechism of a Revolutionary, Sergei G. Nachaev (1847-1882)
Louis Proyect
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