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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… - 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.
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About Dorothy Ray Healey
Dorothy Ray Healey September 22, 1914 – August 6, 2006) was a long-time activist in the Communist Party USA, from the late 1920s to the 1970s, and later became a national vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. In the 1930s, she was one of the first union leaders to advocate for the rights of Chicanos and blacks as factory and field workers.
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Additional quotes by Dorothy Ray Healey
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)
my loyalties are to a vision of socialism, not to a particular organization. There's a phrase I've always liked in the revolutionary anthem "The International." It goes, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us." As Communists we argued that the survival of capitalism depended on the false consciousness of the majority of the people who weren't able to perceive the reality of their own lives. Ironically, the Communists also found themselves bound by "tradition's chains," and substituted a false consciousness for a real understanding of the world around them. The challenge that faces the Left in the future-if it is to have a future-is to base itself on the knowledge of what collective action by human beings can mean, rather than on faith in the infallibility of either its dogma or its leaders. If I were allowed just one piece of advice to give a new generation as to how to sustain a life-long commitment, I would suggest the cultivation of those two essential virtues of a good revolutionary, patience and irony. (p 254)
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you have to look at the differences that exist among women and figure out how to organize to diminish the differences, to transcend the differences, to have policies that overcome them. That's very difficult, it means constant thinking, and studied awareness of what the realities are. It's not a short-term struggle, it's not meant for people who are going to fight today and run away and do something else tomorrow. It's a long-term struggle that requires tenacity and courage.
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