----- Original Message -----
From: BrownBingb at aol.com
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 1:37 PM
Subject: [lbo-talk] progress!
Two quotes from Rudolf Rocker are, I think, germane to the comments by
Glasser and Lieberman:
"Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are rather forced
upon them from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long
time been no guarantee of their security. They do not exist because they
have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have
become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them
will meet with the violent resistance of the populace."
&
"All the political rights and liberties which people enjoy today, they do
not owe to the good-will of their governments, but to their own
strength.... Great mass movements and whole revolutions have been
necessary to wrest these liberties from the ruling classes, who would
never have consented to them voluntarily. What is important is not that
have government have decided to concede these rights, but why they had to
do so."
Brian
CB: As some former slave said , based on personal experience ," power concedes nothing without a demand; never has ; never will. ( and "no progress without struggle")"
frederick douglass
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/
a lot more than "some former slave."
"Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.... "
Until the abolition of classes, once conceded, the ruling classes will forever
conspire (theoretically and practically) to take rights back. As some ole white guy said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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