Evan after I had replaced my civil-libertarian posture with the rigors of Marxism-Leninism, Chinese style, Clark’s [Foreman] advice about the necessi… - Phillip Abbott Luce

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Evan after I had replaced my civil-libertarian posture with the rigors of Marxism-Leninism, Chinese style, Clark’s [Foreman] advice about the necessity of maintaining individual freedoms stuck in my mind and often forced me into open conflict with Progressive Labor. In many ways it was the need for independence, which Clark helped to instill in me, that led to my eventual break with Communism.

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About Phillip Abbott Luce

Phillip Abbott Luce (October 17, 1935 – December 9, 1998) was an American author, lecturer and political organizer who had earlier taken leadership roles in communist organizations, mostly the pro-Red Chinese Progress Labor Movement (PLM), only to repudiate them by early 1965. He was indicted in 1963 as one of the main leaders and spokesman for an unauthorized trip to communist Cuba that arranged an audience with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

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Additional quotes by Phillip Abbott Luce

My wife [Barbra] and I were walking with a friend, and we walked over to Jerry [Rubin] and his buddy… my wife said to him… ‘Hey, Jerry, I really dug your speech.’… ‘I did like the part about private property being pure s_.’ And Jerry got into it and said: ‘Yea, well property is s_ and after the revolution we will divide everything up. Like there won’t be anything private. My shirt will be your shirt and my car will be your car. And it will be one big commune.’ …Barbra went on. ‘That’s a fantastic Indian head band you have on Jerry.’
Retort: ‘Yea. It was given to me by a friend.’
Barbra: ‘Why don’t you give it to me?’
Jerry: ‘Huh?’
Barbra: ‘You said that private property was s_ so why won’t you give me your head band.’
Well, Rubin looked astonished and blurted out: ‘But it’s my head band.’

The difficult decisions first began in December 1964, when I refused to join a Progress Labor Party group preparing to go ‘underground.’ They ended with the most difficult choice—to leave the movement silently, quietly, as so many other had done before, or to risk the censure of those who had once been my friends and tell of the personal experience, political truths, and illegal activities that forced me to ‘split.’ The friends who were no longer friendly, the attempts at personal slander, the chorus that now sang out my name as the most dangerous enemy of all, the attempts to isolate me—all were expected. But the contemptuous and defamatory quality of the attacks were not, and the only thing one can say is that the Old and New Left have this something in common—they have no scruples when it comes to one who sways from their prescribed faith.

Engels spoke of the proletariat as ‘those asses,’ or ‘those stupid workers who believe everything.’ Marx said, ‘The ultimate aim of the movement’ is not to produce small farmers by dividing up the land among them, but on the contrary, to expropriate those who already exist—it was all ‘agricultural property shit.’

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