| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.
The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of
Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential
product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the
shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the
bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions
of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but
conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to
roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are
revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending
transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their
The Communist Manifesto |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: platform at Modane was a British officer engaged in forwarding
Italian potatoes to the British front in France. Afterwards, on
my return, when a little passport irregularity kept me for half a
day in Modane, I went for a walk with him along the winding pass
road that goes down into France. "You see hundreds and hundreds
of new Fiat cars," he remarked, "along here--going up to the
French front."
But there is a return trade. Near Paris I saw scores of
thousands of shells piled high to go to Italy....
I doubt if English people fully realise either the economic
sturdiness or the political courage of their Italian ally. Italy
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Adventure by Jack London: to stick it into the bushman. It was a bit of simulated
playfulness, but the bushman sprang back in evident fright.
Poisoned the weapon was beyond any doubt, and thereafter Binu
Charley carried it threateningly at the prisoner's back.
The sun, sinking behind a lofty western peak, brought on an early
but lingering twilight, and the expedition plodded on through the
evil forest--the place of mystery and fear, of death swift and
silent and horrible, of brutish appetite and degraded instinct, of
human life that still wallowed in the primeval slime, of savagery
degenerate and abysmal. No slightest breezes blew in the gloomy
silence, and the air was stale and humid and suffocating. The
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