War & Peace Quote by Johann Most

Revolution doesn’t wait for the seminar to end. Most is slicing through a dilemma that haunts every mass movement: do you prioritize purity of consciousness or the urgency of action? His answer is hard-nosed and tactical. The proletariat doesn’t need to be fully “enlightened” to be “called into battle” - a deliberately martial metaphor that treats politics as conflict, not conversation. That line is a warning to armchair idealists who confuse education with permission.

But Most isn’t endorsing ignorance, either. The second clause snaps the quote into focus: agitation must produce “as much enlightenment as possible,” and it has to travel through “oral and printed” channels. This is propaganda as infrastructure. He’s sketching a communications strategy for a pre-radio world: speeches in halls and taverns, pamphlets and newspapers passed hand to hand, ideas made portable and repeatable. Education isn’t a prerequisite; it’s a byproduct and accelerant of struggle.

The subtext is organizational: movements can’t be built by waiting for unanimous ideological maturity. They are built by mobilizing partial agreement, then using participation to deepen commitment. Most, an anarchist firebrand associated with militant “propaganda of the deed,” is also revealing a quieter truth about radical politics: violence and pedagogy are not opposites but siblings in the same campaign. You fight with bodies, and you fight with narratives. His intent is to reconcile impatience with discipline - to make revolution feel not only inevitable, but executable.