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Change does not just happen, and it certainly doesn't just come because one day Tony Benn might be prime minister at the head of a left-wing Labour g… - Paul Foot
" "Change does not just happen, and it certainly doesn't just come because one day Tony Benn might be prime minister at the head of a left-wing Labour government. It comes when people fight for it. And that is why we, with our four thousand members and a fighting newspaper, are more optimistic and confident than you with your quarter of a million paper members, with your resolutions, intrigues, doubts and dilemmas.
How much more confident and optimistic we would both be if we were members of the same organisation.
And remember, it is no good appealing to me to join the Labour Party. I would not be let in. My application alone would probably cost you a dozen more defections from the Parliamentary Labour Party to the SDP and another couple of points drop in the opinion polls.
No, I'm afraid there is only one possible way in which we can now come together: for you to come to us.
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About Paul Foot
Paul Foot (8 November 1937 – 18 July 2004) was an English journalist and socialist. He was the son of Lord Caradon and the nephew of Michael Foot.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Paul Mackintosh Foot
•
Hon. Paul Mackintosh Foot
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Additional quotes by Paul Foot
Socialist society can only come about by a revolution; if the masses, through general strikes and mass agitation, seize the means of production from their present owners. ‘But doesn’t that involve violence? Surely you’re not prepared to use violence to achieve your political ends?’ This cry is always flung in the face of revolutionaries, usually by people who are only too prepared to accept without complaint the recurring and brutalising violence of the class society in which we live. It comes from people who ignored or supported the orgy of destruction which the government of America launched for more than a full decade against the people of Vietnam; from people who offer sympathy and succour to the regime of the Shah of Persia, which is founded on the torture of dissenters; of from people who hardly raise a word of protest about the deep violence of tyrannical governments all over the world – from Thailand, to South Africa to South Korea; or from people who never turn a hair at the institutionalised violence of everyday life – of people being maimed and battered in factories and building sites through negligence and greed of employers; of old people tormented by hunger and cold.
Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-to-day struggles of working people.
Add to these anecdotes and quotations [Andrew] Neil's writing style, which is dour and monotonous, that in all its 481 pages there is not the slightest trace of a joke nor a sign that the greatest young journalist of his generation ever enjoyed a single book he didn't serialise, and you might conclude that Full Disclosure should be consigned to everlasting fire. You would be quite wrong. The book is thoroughly absorbing. It is a dark tragedy the chief fascination of which is that its author does not realise he is in a tragedy at all.
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