The revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.
Interpretation
Revolutions happen when oppressed individuals refuse to comply with their oppressors.
The quote by Karl Hess emphasizes the power of non-cooperation in the face of oppression. When individuals who are wronged or victimized choose to stop supporting or complying with systems that exploit or harm them, it can lead to significant societal change and even revolutionary movements. This highlights the importance of individual agency and solidarity in challenging unjust systems.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social change, one might say, 'As Karl Hess stated, the revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.'
It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.
We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.
They [anarchists] spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that itβs all choice and chance.
That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.
Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party, like the Social Democracy.
Change is not made without inconvenience.
You've got to acknowledge what you did wrong and see if you can fix it to the extent possible, and turn the page.
Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march.
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