| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Manon Lescaut by Abbe Prevost: arguments are unopposed. Allow me to reason for a few moments in
my turn. Can you pretend that what you call the happiness of
virtue is exempt from troubles, and crosses, and cares? By what
name will you designate the dungeon, the rack, the inflections
and tortures of tyrants? Will you say with the Mystics[1] that
the soul derives pleasure from the torments of the body? You are
not bold enough to hold such a doctrine--a paradox not to be
maintained. This happiness, then, that you prize so much, has a
thousand drawbacks, or is, more properly speaking, but a tissue
of sufferings through which one hopes to attain felicity. If by
the power of imagination one can even derive pleasure from these
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: are like this: most of them want a man, but don't want the sex, but
they put up with it, as part of the bargain. The more old-fashioned
sort just lie there like nothing and let you go ahead. They don't mind
afterwards: then they like you. But the actual thing itself is nothing
to them, a bit distasteful. Add most men like it that way. I hate it.
But the sly sort of women who are like that pretend they're not. They
pretend they're passionate and have thrills. But it's all cockaloopy.
They make it up. Then there's the ones that love everything, every kind
of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural
one. They always make you go off when you're NOTin the only place you
should be, when you go off.--Then there's the hard sort, that are the
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective
duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for
the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the
only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois --
for the benefit of the working class.
3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great
modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the
proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own
The Communist Manifesto |
