"UNDERNEATH the conservative popular base is the substratum
of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and
other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable.
"They exist outside the
democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for
ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is
revolutionary even if their consciousness is not.
"Their opposition hits the
system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an
elementary force which violates the rules of the game and, in doing so, reveals
it as a rigged game.
"When they get together and go out into the streets,
without arms, without protection, in order to ask for the most primitive civil
rights, they know that they face dogs, stones and bombs, jail, concentration
camps, even death. Their force is behind every political demonstration for the
victims of law and order. The fact that they start refusing to play the game
may be the fact that marks the beginning of the end of a period.”
Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
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