Vectography

The Process of Transformation

Man: A real obligation of revolutionaries, perhaps the major job, is to wake people up to their own strengths, their own possibilities. The deadliest weapons are the weapons that convince that you can do nothing, that you can’t change, and that you can’t move forward. The revolution in Vietnam was won long before the U.S. got out, long before France was defeated at Dien Bien Phu; the revolution was won when the people became a people for themselves. 

And that same process will be true here. Before it’s obvious on the face of it, or on the surface, that a giant transformation is going to happen — it will have already been concluded in terms of the hearts and minds of the masses of people.

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Woman: There’s an important relationship between having a vision of revolution and a vision of the future, and an understanding of what human beings are capable of, and what’s possible — and a grasp of the work that goes in to making it happen. Not skipping any steps, organizing people, bringing people together, forging demands, making a revolutionary program, identifying the enemy.

Mao talks about this, he says: without dreams, there would be no work, there would be no toil; and without toil and work, there would be no dreams. Both dreams and toil are part of what make up human beings. And the dreams that people have, the visions that people have of what could be better, effects their work, changes their work, transforms their work, and the work that they do makes possible their dreams.

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Man: We think of communism as the highest aspiration of people We don’t think of communism as the loss of self in the mass; we think of communism as the discovery of self in society.  It’s inconceivable to me that any advanced notion of human capabilities and human possibilities would conceive of human beings isolated from each other, living on islands. We are after all in a social world, and we realize ourselves, we become our best selves, in relationship to other people. And communism to us represents the opposition to the atomization of people, the ripping of people off from each other, and the coming together of sisters and brothers. That’s why we keep using the word ‘communism.’ 

— statements made by semi-anonymous members of the Weather Underground in 1976, from a little-seen documentary made about the radical political/social organization (which, at that point in time, was considered a terrorist group by the United States government). Watch it here, and notice the correlations between the struggles (and the language) then and now.