The sort of activity that meets the criteria of all the criticisms – that is based on immediate needs, in a mass on-going struggle, in direct connection to our everyday lives and that does not treat capital as something external to us, is this working class struggle.
Andrew X
#496
#484
Being a leftist is a calling, not a career; it’s a vocation, not a profession. It means you are concerned about structural violence, you are concerned about exploitation at the work place, you are concerned about institutionalized contempt against gay brothers and lesbian sisters, hatred against peoples of color, and the subordination of women. It means that you are willing to fight against, and to try to understand the sources of social misery at the structural and institutional levels, as well as at the existential and personal levels. That’s what it means to be a leftist; that’s why we choose to be certain kinds of human beings.
Cornel West
#475
It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
Michael Foucault
#465
You can’t blow up a social relationship. The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what replaced it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for the creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to, what they believed in, what existed unchallenged in their own personalities.
Anarres Books Collective, You Can’t Blow up a Social Relationship
#431
The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Nelson Mandela
#384
Do not say that we are few
And that the commitment is too great for us.
Would you say that two or three tufts of clouds
Are few in the corner of the summer sky?
In a moment they let down wherever …
Flashes of lightning, bursts of thunder
And it rains on everything.
Do not say that we are few
Say only that we are.
Lee Kwang Su
#291
They aren’t going to stop destroying the planet until we make it too costly for them to continue. The sooner we do, the better.
Crimethinc Collective, The Climate is Changing
#288
The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.
Judith Butler
#240
Will someone else’s life be brighter tomorrow
because of what you have done today?
William Arthur Ward
