“Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual.”

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

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Curtis White17

American academic 1951

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Source: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), p. 147

“Marx felt that the job of the proletariat was to be that of the tool. For Marx, the proletariat is ‘the material weapon of philosophy.’ In order to bring the proletariat into line he must first know it, and lean how to manage it. But his contempt for it, his hatred for the ‘petits grands hommes,’ is obvious by his constant referral to ‘the rabble,’ ‘the emigrant scum,’ ‘the rotten emigrant swine,’ ‘the toads.’ Marx asked Engels, “What is this rabble good for if it forgets how to fight?’”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The Intellectual Student’s Guide to Survival (1968), p. 75

“What Marx and Thoreau shared with Christ was a sense that "the letter killeth." What killed was not the letter as Mosaic Law but as secular "legality." Legality had so saturated the human world that it stood before it as a kind of second nature.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

“The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes. This was first demonstrated by the French proletariat in the Commune and brilliantly confirmed by the Russian proletariat in the December uprising.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Lessons of the Commune" http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm, Collected Works, Vol. 13. <br class="br">Collected Works

“Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune — civil war. Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Lessons of the Commune”, in Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. 2 (23 March 1908) http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm, as translated by Bernard Isaacs, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 478. <br class="br">1900s <br class="br">Variant: The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes. This was first demonstrated by the French proletariat in the Commune and brilliantly confirmed by the Russian proletariat in the December uprising.

“Marx said that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat lies between capitalism and communism. The more the proletariat presses the bourgeoisie, the more furiously they will resist. We know what vengeance was wreaked on the workers in France in 1848. And when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Speech to the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission Staff (7 November 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 169-70 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/nov/07b.htm <br class="br">1910s