You've got to accompany any demand for privatization with worker and community control. It shouldn't only be the worker, it should be the worker and … - Dorothy Ray Healey

My concept of what it meant to be a revolutionary was based on a montage of the organizers from the Sinclair novels, along with my childhood memories from Denver. I also began to read an enormous amount of history around this time. I was very taken with Charles Beard-at that point his writings seemed to me to represent great Marxist truths because he talked about the things that high school history never talked about, the underlying economic motives of history makers. I read everything he and his wife Mary Beard wrote. I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me.

As she explained to Joel Gardner a few months after she had resigned from the Communist Party: “If I were to write a book, I'd make the title of the book... a phrase out of the Communist song "The International." . . . The phrase goes, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us." Well, I would make the title of my book "Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us," because my argument would be that just as... capitalism operates through the false consciousness that it gives the majority of people who aren't able to perceive the reality of their own lives..., so the same thing happens with Marxists. . . . They, too, substitute a false consciousness for a real consciousness . . . . A real revolutionary party [has] to be able to constantly keep alive that challenging, questioning and probing of the real scene around it. . . . Our theory never will quite match the reality, but at least one strives to approximate it, to see what is the substance, and not just the form. (p 13)

I won't see socialism in my lifetime; I don't know if my son will see it in his, or even my grandchildren in theirs. There is no way to foretell what kind of political developments and issues will galvanize a future generation to turn towards socialism. The model I embraced in my youth, the vision of a vanguard party of the working class seizing power in the midst of a great social and political crisis like the one that had overtaken Russia in 1917, is no longer relevant. But I still believe that working people must be at the center of any real movement for socialism, for they are the majority for whose well-being that government "of, by, and for the people" should be concerned. Ultimately I have faith that people, given the understanding of how they can help bring it about, want to live in a better world. People can change the world, but they can't do it as individuals alone. They have to join with others to do it. One thing I have not changed my views on over the years is the belief that organization is the key to winning victories for social change. That's why it was such a tragedy that so little in the way of organized radicalism survived the collapse of the New Left. (p 252)