115 quotes found
"Now, there are at least two ways in which sit-ins and civil disobedience and whatever -- least two major ways in which it can occur. One, when a law exists, is promulgated, which is totally unacceptable to people and they violate it again and again and again till it's rescinded, appealed. Alright, but there's another way. There's another way. Sometimes, the form of the law is such as to render impossible its effective violation -- as a method to have it repealed. Sometimes, the grievances of people are more -- extend more -- to more than just the law, extend to a whole mode of arbitrary power, a whole mode of arbitrary exercise of arbitrary power. And that's what we have here. We have an autocracy which -- which runs this university."
"Well I ask you to consider -- if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something -- the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be -- have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean -- Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!And that -- that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!"
"We have a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over 30."
"The only solution to pollution is a people's humane revolution."
"I still want my right to defend myself. A railroad operation, and you know it, from Nixon on down. they got you running around violating my constitutional rights."
"We're hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people. You got that?"
"When we use the term pig, for example, we are referring to the people who systematically violate the peoples' constitutional rights- whether they be monopoly capitalists or police. The term is now being adopted by radicals, hippies, and minority peoples. Even the workers, when the pigs supported strike-breakers like they did as Union Oil where 100 local police came in a cracked strikers' heads, began to call them by their true name."
"But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party- whose members for the most part come from the ghetto- seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people's language."
"All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers."
"Racism and ethnic differences allow the power structure to exploit the masses of workers in this country, because that's the key by which they maintain their control. To divide the people and conquer them is the objective of the power structure. It's the ruling class, the very small minority, the few avaricious, demagogic hogs and rats who control and infest the government. The ruling class and their running dogs, their lackeys, their bootlickers, their Toms and their black racists, their cultural nationalists - they're all the running dogs of the ruling class. These are the ones who help to maintain and aid the power structure by perpetuating their racist attitudes and using racism as a means to divide the people. But it's really the small, minority ruling class that is dominating, exploiting, and oppressing the working and laboring people."
"I really don't think the government practically cares whether it is right or wrong or even if it can win the case. I think the whole attempt is to simply grind you down, a process of harassment and intimidation, a process of tying up peoples' energies and money so that nothing can be done…Like the case of Bobby Seale. His years in prison can't be returned. Still he is a man under a stigma. The whole adventure was so ambivalent so that there has to be a doubt left in the public mind-which is the point."
"We are going through a crucial historical crisis in which each year poses more acutely the global problem of rationally mastering the new productive forces and creating a new civilization. Yet the international working-class movement, on which depends the prerequisite overthrow of the economic infrastructure of exploitation, has registered only a few partial local successes. Capitalism has invented new forms of struggle (state intervention in the economy, expansion of the consumer sector, fascist governments) while camouflaging class oppositions through various reformist tactics and exploiting the degenerations of working-class leaderships. In this way it has succeeded in maintaining the old social relations in the great majority of the highly , thereby depriving a of its indispensable material base. In contrast, the underdeveloped or colonized countries, which over the last decade have engaged in the most direct and massive battles against imperialism, have begun to win some very significant victories. These victories are aggravating the contradictions of the capitalist economy and (particularly in the case of the Chinese revolution) could be a contributing factor toward a renewal of the whole . Such a renewal cannot limit itself to reforms within the capitalist or countries, but must develop conflicts posing the question of power everywhere."
"The shattering of modern culture is the result, on the plane of ideological struggle, of the chaotic crisis of these antagonisms. The new desires that are taking shape are presented in distorted form: present-day resources could enable them to be fulfilled, but the anachronistic economic structure is incapable of developing these resources to such ends. Ruling-class ideology has meanwhile lost all coherence because of the depreciation of its successive conceptions of the world (a depreciation which leads the ruling class to historical indecision and uncertainty); because of the coexistence of a range of mutually contradictory ideologies (such as Christianity and social-democracy); and because of the mixing into contemporary Western culture of a number of only recently appreciated features of several foreign civilizations. The main goal of ruling-class ideology is therefore to maintain this confusion."
"We must call attention, among the workers parties or the extremist tendencies within those parties, to the need to undertake an effective ideological action in order to combat the emotional influence of . On every occasion, by every hyper-political means, we must publicize desirable alternatives to the spectacle of the capitalist way of life, so as to destroy the bourgeois idea of happiness. At the same time, taking into account the existence, within the various ruling classes, of elements that have always tended (out of boredom and thirst for novelty) toward things that lead to the disappearance of their societies, we should incite the persons who control some of the vast resources that we lack to provide us with the means to carry out our experiments, out of the same motives of potential profit as they do with ."
"The accumulation of production and of over-improving technological capabilities is proceeding even faster than nineteenth-century communism predicted. But we have remained at a stage of superequipped prehistory. A century of revolutionary attempts has failed: human life has not been rationalized and impassioned; the project of a classless society has not yet been achieved. We have entered a never-ending growth of material means that remains at the service of fundamentally static interests, and therefore at the service of values everyone recognizes as long dead. The spirit of the dead weighs very heavily on the technology of the living. The economic planning that reigns everywhere is insane, not so much because os its academic obsession with organizing the enrichment of the years to come as because of the rotten blood of the past that circulates through its veins and is endlessly pumped forth with each artificial pulsation of this "heart of a heartless world.""
"If someone thinks that a hierarchical bureaucracy can be a revolutionary power, and also agrees that mass tourism as it is globally organized by the society of the spectacle is a good thing and a pleasure, then, like Sartre, he can pay a visit to China or somewhere else. His error, his stupidity and his lies shouldn't surprise anyone."
"The old schema of the contradiction between productive forces and production relations should certainly no longer be understood as a short-term death warrant for capitalist production, as if the latter were doomed to automatically stagnate and become incapable of continuing its development. This contradiction must be construed as a judgment (which remains to be executed with the appropriate weapons) against this self-regulating production's niggardly and dangerous development, in view of the grandiose possible development that could be based on the present economic infrastructure."
"Ideology, in its various fluid forms that have replaced the solid mythical system of the past, has an increasingly large role to play as the specialist rulers need to increasingly regulate all aspects of an expanding production and consumption."
"The accelerated degradation of cultural ideology has given rise to a permanent crisis in this intellectual and artistic valorization, a crisis that dadaism brought out into the open. A dual movement has clearly characterized this end of culture: on one hand, the dissemination of false novelties automatically recycled with new packaging by autonomous spectacular mechanisms; and on the other hand, the public refusal to play along and the sabotage carried out by individuals who were clearly among those who would have been most capable of renewing "quality" cultural production."
"It is the merit of Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda (A. Colin, 1962), which describes the unity of the various forms of conditioning, to have shown that this advertising-propaganda is not merely an unhealthy excrescence that could be prohibited, but is at the same time a remedy in a generally sick society, a remedy that makes the sickness tolerable while aggravating it. People are to a great extent accomplices of propaganda, of the reigning spectacle, because they cannot reject it without contesting the society as a whole."
"Born to a premature death, a menial, subsistence-wage worker, odd-job man, the cleaner, the caught, the man under hatches, without bail-that's me, the colonial victim. Anyone who can pass the civil service examination today can kill me tomorrow. Anyone who passed the civil service examination yesterday can kill me today with complete immunity."
"Revolution within a modern industrial capitalist society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly or indirectly support existing property relations. It must include the total suppression of all classes and individuals who endorse the present state of property relations or who stand to gain from it. Anything less than this is reform."
"Revolutionary change means the seizure of all that is held by the 1 percent, and the transference of these holdings into the hands of the remaining 99 percent. If the 1 percent are simply replaced by another 1 percent, revolutionary change has not taken place."
"When any election is held it will fortify rather than destroy the credibility of the power brokers. When we participate in this election to win, instead of disrupt, we're lending to its credibility."
"Prestige stands between the masses and a revolt against their class enemy. The aura of magic, glamour, luster and splendid permanence covers the fascists like a protective layer of fat. The slimy scales of majesty shield and conceal the dilapidation of the old bourgeois reign of terror."
"The prestige of power as the subjective effect of a past deed or reputation, real or fancied, then has a very definite life process."
"Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe?"
"The debate ends, the action begins. It is not a question of the necessity of violence, but how to organize it to fit our unique situation, to tie it with flawless exactitude to our political activity, and to organize it immediately."
"The government of the U.S.A. and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed. This is the starting point, and the end. We have the means to this end; the problem is to develop acceptance of their use."
"Top-heavy establishment organizations that exist openly are always a reflection of the men who staff them."
"Waiting for power to move to its inevitable collapse is suicidal for all concerned. Blacks and other Third World peoples have the very imminent prospect of genocidal tactics to contend with, and we can now all see that the modern industrial state, motivated by exclusive groups of capitalist masters, cannot regulate itself to make possible an inclusive production and distribution of goods, or production without a massive waste of resources and destruction of all that stands about. The debate ends, the action begins. It is not question of the necessity of violence, but of how to organize it."
"Our aim is to stop the life cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with our own revolutionary culture. This can be done only by creating perfect disorder within the cycle of the enemy culture's life process and leaving a power vacuum to be filled by our building revolutionary culture."
"An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die. The holder of so-called high public office is always merely an extension of the hated ruling corporate class."
"This is a huge nation dominated by the most reactionary and violent ruling class in the history of the world, where the majority of the people just simply cannot understand that they are existing on the misery and discomfort of the world."
"How can the establishment protect an electrical supply line and the thousands of transformers, etc.? Effective positioning of the guards is militarily impossible. ... We must call strikes to enforce our demands on capital. To enforce the strike we must stop the plant's power source. Standing in the gateway with a placard and a pamphlet alone will not dull a worker's short-term interest in wage slavery."
"There are no good aspects of monopoly capital, so no reservations need be recognized in its destruction. Monopoly capital is the enemy. It crushes the life force of all of the people. It must be completely destroyed, as quickly as possible, utterly, totally, ruthlessly, relentlessly destroyed."
"The mass psycho-social national cohesiveness has trembled on the brink of disruption and disintegration repeatedly over the last fifty years, threatening to fly apart from its own concentric inner dynamics. But at each crisis it was allowed to reform itself; with each reform, revolution became more remote."
"After the fascists have succeeded in crushing the vanguard elements and the threat they pose is removed, the ruling class goes on about the business of making profits as usual. The significance of the “new fascist arrangement" lies in the fact that this business-as-usual is accompanied by concessions to the degenerate segment of the working class, with the aim of creating a buffer zone between the ruling class and the still potentially revolutionary segments of the lower classes."
"Intellectuals still argue whether Amerika is a fascist country. This concern is typical of the Amerikan left’s flight from reality. ... This is actually a manifestation of the authoritarian process seeping into its own psyche."
"The revolution has failed. Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class."
"From its inception, the fascist arrangement has attempted to create the illusion of a mass society in which the traditional capitalist ruling class would continue to play its leading role."
"Hierarchy has had six thousand years of trial. It will never succeed for long in any form. ... My opinion is that we are at the historical climax (the flash point) of the totalitarian period."
"Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried — a consciousness that was compromised."
"The fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph."
"Democratic Centralism is the only way to deal effectively with the Amerikan ordeal. The central committee of the people's vanguard party must make its presence felt through the various levels of the overall movement."
"I deny the existence of black racism outright, by fiat I deny it. Too much black blood has flowed between the chasm that separates the races. It's fundamentally unfair to expect the black man to differentiate at a glance between the various kinds of white racism."
"All levels of struggle must be conceived as inclined planes leading inexorably to a point where armed conflict will engulf two or more sections of the people."
"The theory of an existing and benevolent god simply doesn't make sense to anyone who is rational. A benevolent and omnipotent god would never allow such imbalances as I see to exist for one second. If by chance I am wrong, however I must then assume that being born black called for some automatic punishment for sins I know nothing about, and being innocent it behooves me to defy god."
"M.L.K. organized his thoughts much in the same manner as your have organized yours. If you really knew and fully understood his platform you would never have expressed sch sentiments as you did in your last letter. I am sure you are acquainted with the fact that he was opposed to violence and war; he was indeed a devout pacifist. It is very odd, almost unbelievable,that so violent and tumultuous a setting as this can still produce such men. He was out of place, out of season, too naive, too innocent, too cultured, too civil for these times. That is why his end was so predictable."
"I'm convinced that it is the psychopathic personality that searches out a uniform. There's little doubt of what's going on in that man's head who will voluntarily don any uniform."
"Fortune must soon smile on me because sincere effort is always rewarded. Nature allows no such imbalances.. I am assured and completely self-possessed in he knowledge that all contradictions and conflicts must one day be resolved."
"If children being blown out of this existence while attending church services, men being lunched for a gesture, colonialism, the inquisition, and H-bombs haven't affected you, nothing I say h ere can help you. If you could live my life one week and see the things I see, feel the pain I feel, and die a little bit each day as I do all your illusions and apparitions would vanish."
"Do you know who I blame for what has happened to me the last 25 years, and before to my ancestors? I would be narrow-minded indeed if I blamed any of you, my folks. I don't blame you for not teaching me how to get what i wanted without getting put in jail, nor do I blame myself. I was born knowing nothing and am a product of my total surroundings. I blame the capitalistic dog, the imperialistic, cave-dwelling brute that kidnapped us, pulled the rug from under us, made us a caste within his society with no vertical economic mobility. As soon as all this became clear to me and I developed the nerve to admit it to myself, that we were defeated in war and are now captives, slaves or actually that we inherited a neoslave existence, I immediately become relaxed, always expecting the worst, and started working on the remedy. Can you play chess? it relaxes, builds foresight, alertness, concentration, and judgement. Learn, so we can play next year."
"It is difficult, very difficult to get any facts concerning our history and our way of life. The lies, half-truths, and propaganda have won total sway over the facts. We have no knowledge of our heritage. Our economic status has reduced knowledge of our heritage. Our economic status has reduced our minds to a state of complete oblivion. The young black who comes out of college of the university is as ignorant and unlearned as the white laborer. For all practical purposes he is worse of than when he went in, for he has learned only the attitudes and ways of the snake, and a few well-worded lies. The ruling culture refuses to let us know how much we did to advance civilization in our lands long ago. It refuses to recognize and appreciate our craft and strength an allow us some of the fruits of our labor. All this has left an emptiness in our lives, a void, a vacuum that must soon be filled by hostilities, I am most certainly committed, until the day I'm sent to the warrior's rest. By the ruling culture's acts of greed and barbarism the uncommitted will soon learn that compromise with such an enemy is impossible. Our two fortunes move along a collision course."
"Patience has its limits. Take it too far and it's cowardice."
"Change does come, but not when or in the ways we want it to come. George Jackson, Malcolm X-now people all over the world were changed by them. Because they told the secret; now, the secret was out. (“And the secret?”) Put it this way. In 1968, along with Lord Caradon (British Delegate to the United Nations then), I addressed an assembly of the World Council of Churches in Switzerland on "white racism or world community?" When Lord Caradon was asked why the West couldn't break relations with South Africa, he brought out charts and figures that showed that the West would be bankrupt if they did that: the prosperity of the West is standing on the back of the South African miner. When he stands up, the whole thing will be over."
"George Jackson was murdered by mindless, carbine-toting San Quentin guards because he refused, he resisted, and he helped to teach his fellow prisoners that there was hope through struggle."
"George grew into manhood in prison, educated himself, and became a revolutionary. The publication of his prison letters in 1971 would make him famous because of his keen intelligence and gift for self-expression."
"Reading Blood In My Eye, I discovered that capitalist-private property relations are the source of class inequalities, which is the primary factor in my being a member of a class that bears all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages. Under the influence of illegitimate-capitalist values, I was pursuing the alleviation of social-economic hardship through individual advancement. This is a wholly inadequate remedy to social problems because it doesn’t challenge the fundamental injustice of class-exploitation and class-oppression, which are responsible for creating the socio-economic ills in the first place. Unaware of my class interest, I was perpetuating my own oppression by engaging in competitive capitalist practices that ensure the smooth functioning of the system as the exploiting minority profits in more ways than one off the division and disunity engendered by competition, so prevalent amongst the exploited. Look around: competition, euphemistically called “individuality,” permeates and is systematically promoted to the masses of people while the corporate conglomerations and Fortune 500 are busy “merging and monopolizing.”"
"U.S. bombers are now raining death on all Indochina. Chemical defoliants have changed beautiful, lush countryside into a barren wasteland, uninhabitable for generations. Whole rice crops have been wiped out. And the Vietnamese revealed to scientists that defoliants cause severe genetic damage to human beings. A pregnant woman who drinks water which contains defoliant is more likely to have a malformed child than a woman exposed to atomic radiation in Hiroshima. The whole population of 5 Northeastern provinces of South Vietnam is being forcibly relocated to create 60 mile wide free-fire zone for Amerikan bombers. There is open speculation in Washington about using tactical nuclear weapons in this area. This is not a war against the people who are fighting now - it is a war against the future."
"We attacked the Capitol because it is, along with the White House and the Pentagon, the worldwide symbol of the government which is now attacking Indochina. To millions of people here and in Latin America, Africa and Asia, it is a monument to U.S. domination over the planet. The invaders of Laos will not have peace in this country. Young people here will do everything we can to harass, disrupt and destroy this murderous government. The thousands of people who have begun to protest and fight this new escalation are saying to the world that we will retaliate against Ameriika's crimes. Our actions, our protests and the spirit of our resistance will be welcomed and supported by people all over the world."
"The men who are running this war are a new vicious breed of murderers. Kissinger smilingly referred to Nixon's address as his "End of the World" speech, while Amerika moves closer to war with China."
"Here is PRAIRIE FIRE, our political ideology- a strategy for anti-imperialism and revolution inside the imperial US. It comes out of our own practice of the last five years and reflects a diversity of experiences. This paper is not the product of one or two people, nor even a small handful of us. Rather PRAIRIE FIRE represents the politics and collective efforts of an organization. It has been the focus of our study groups and our political education."
"PRAIRIE FIRE is written to communist-minded people, independent organizers and anti-imperialists; those who carry the traditions and lessons of the struggles of the last decade, those who join in the struggles of today. PRAIRIE FIRES is written to all sisters and brothers who are engaged in armed struggle against the enemy. It is written to prisoners, women's groups, collectives, study groups, workers' organizing committees, communes, GI organizers, consciousness-raising groups, veterans, community groups and revolutionaries of all kinds; to all who will read, criticize and bring its content to life in practice. It is written as an argument against those who oppose action and hold back the struggle."
"The unique and fundamental condition of this time is the decline of US imperialism. Our society is in social and economic crisis and assumption about the US are turned on their heads. These are hard conditions to live through. But they are favorable for the people and for revolution."
"Our intention is to disrupt the empire... to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle to attack from the inside."
"Our intention is to forge an underground... a clandestine political organization engaged in every form of struggle, protected from the eyes and weapons of the state, a base against repression, to accumulate lessons, experience and constant practice, a base from which to attack."
"Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle. Without mass struggle there can be no revolution. Without armed struggle there can be no victory."
"In the wake of the US defeat in Vietnam comes an unprecedented governmental crisis. Watergate is a magnificent victory of the struggle of the 60's, a reflection of the war coming home. Crisis chases crisis as state leaders search for a consolidating strategy. The turmoil is indicative of serious and fatal weakness in the system. It offers an unparalleled opportunity for revolutionary and popular movements."
"The empire feeds on war. War is necessary for expansion and colonial control, but unsuccessful and unjust war loosens the imperialist's hold over the home base."
"Our organized forces are small, the enemy's forces are huge. We live inside the oppressor nation, particularly suited to urban guerilla warfare. We are strategically situated in the nerve centers of the international empire, where the institutions and symbols of imperial power are concentrated. The cities will be a major battleground, for the overwheliming majority of people live in the cities; the cities are our terrain."
"We live in a whirlwind; nonetheless, time is on the side of the guerillas. Fighting the enemy is urgent, and we have a duty do all we can."
"Revolution is a dialectical process of destruction and creation. In the US, revolution is intimately bound to the process of defeating imperialism around the world. Any conception of socialism defined in national terms, within so extreme and predatory an oppressor nation as the US, is a view that leads in practice to fight for particular privileged interest and is every dangerous ideology. Active combat against empire is the only foundation for socialist revolution in the oppressor nation."
"Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism. It is the rejection of empire and white supremacy. Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication o the social system based on profit. Socialism means control of the productive forces for the good of the whole community instead of the few who live on hilltops and in mansions. Socialism means priorities based on human need instead of corporate greed. Socialism creates the conditions for a decent and creative quality of life for all."
"A people's history is a powerful weapon. In the hands of the oppressors, history is twisted and caricatured. In the arsenal of the revolution, it helps us draw the difficult lessons from past struggles and identify the resistance which has always opposed the enemy."
"The truth about the Rosenbergs is just today being understood-another step on the long march toward exposing the crimes of this empire and uncovering the truth about our own past."
"The systematic domination of women is an underpinning of imperialism: under imperialism, the organization and fabric of society - the family, production, reproduction, and all social relations - keep women dependent and powerless. Sexism is the institutionalized and encouraged system of control."
"Zionism does not represent the Jews. It is a racist ideology based on the claim that "God"chose a people superior to others. It has been consistently used as n alternative to class struggle and socialism for Jews, undermining Jewish progressive and working-class traditions."
"Their solution is a democratic secular Palestine that will accommodate all Palestinians: Jews, Moslems and Christians. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is the umbrella organization which coordinates policy of the liberation forces."
"The modern male-run nuclear family, when we tear away the veil of sentimentality, is the basic unit of capitalist society. Capitalism and the modern family matured together historically, feeding each other's development. In the family, women both reproduce the labor force and begin the socialization process of the new generation, which is essential to the productive system and the functioning of society. Women bear the major responsibility for the nurturing, health and education of families. These are treated like personal problems, yet they are necessary tasks, fulfilled at minimal cost and effort to the imperialists."
"Modern US society, organized for the business of imperialism, is a place where young people face particular oppression. Schools, the family, the media, all attempt to socialize us into a competitive, acquisitive, individualized system. The end result is intended to be competitive sexual roles, marriage, and alienating, humiliating work as functionaries for imperialism."
"Profit chases greed in a reckless race across the Earth"
"We are living in a huge and naturally beautiful land. The mountains, the desertsand the plains hold the riches of history from Indian tribes who dwelt here - places like Four Corners and thee Black Hills, sacred land to the Navaho and the Sioux. Eagles fly overhead in some areas, and coyotes howl at the moon. Snow lands, river lands: traveled many times, seen by people's eye."
"All economic activity that does not go to satisfy human need is waste. Advertising and marketing (a 30$ billion a year business), useless consumer goods, planned obsolescence, bureaucracy, the military - all aspects of waste - add up to the social cost of maintaining this outmoded system. It is working people and the oppressed of empire who bear the cost."
"This accumulated productive power is used for the most selfish and backward purposes. Whereas this wealth is produced by the people of the world it is used to enrich the idle handful that controls it, and to subjugate the dispossessed with the destructive power of economic control and war"
"This irrational and revolting system leaves much social wealth wasted and undeveloped. What is produced bears little relationship to what is needed. For this reason Marxist-Leninists speak of the "anarchy of production" when we refer to the way productive forces are organized under imperialism. The great injustice of this system is that it leaves its potential unrealized while maintaining scarcity for billions of people."
"US society is corrupted by the values that necessarily accompany piracy - racism, greed, competitiveness, brutality, sexism, callousness. The ruling class calls the backward, criminal aspects of culture into being and sets them into motion. The society is the rat-race, marked by an anti-social premium on individualism. There is a stark poverty for masses of people materially and culturally, a poverty in the quality of life."
"We are taught that our biology is our destiny. We are conditioned to look and act within narrow confines to fulfill our primary role as sexual partners and reproducers. Distorted and competitive standards of beauty are the surface over a whole system of sexual objectification. We live in an anti-life culture, where women are denied control of our bodies- where sexual repression and hand in hand taboos go hand with prostitution and sexual exploitation. Men are to taught to use women."
"The oppression of women pervert the cultural values of the whole society. Men are alienated from children and from human emotion. Women are cut off from one another, threatened and competing. Sexism is a form of cultural conditioning which enables the system to exploit everyone."
"Sexism, which denies the humanity of women, destroys the humanity of men. Men, too, are understanding that sexism makes them emotionally barren and culturally warped. In response to the challenge of women, many men have begun to make a commitment to struggle against sexism. These allies are a victory of the women's movement. They are an indication of the potential for further alliances with those in struggle and with oppressed people everywhere."
"Monopoly capital/imperialism is an irrational system. It is not organized to meet human needs. It is run by a very small ruling class whole only morality is the morality of the maximum profit. This handful of white men control the enormous concentrations of wealth, the means of production, the government These are the imperialists, the common enemy. Thirty-two percent of the personal wealth in the US is owned by 1.6% of the population. Who res these enemies? of all the imperial dynasties and major thieves of our time, the Rockefeller family stands out: the phenomenal growth of their clan's influence and riches parallels the development of US imperialism."
"Stolen wealth - not Yankee ingenuity - is the basis of the tremendous concentration in the US of productive forces - large factories with advanced machinery, elaborate computer systems, highly extended organization, the labor of women and men from many nations - all contributing to an astounding productive capability."
"This is a death culture. It beats its children and discards its old people, imprisons its rebels and drinks itself to death. It breeds and educates us to be socially irresponsible, arrogant, ignorant and anti-political. We are the most technologically advanced people in the wold and the most politically and socially backwards."
"The day the COWboys came to town the red bled out from the 'merican flags, poured from windows and swirled thick in the streets for the marching band"
"We are living in a time when the city around us disssolves into a dragon-shaped land, the other side of the world, another people a history whose scroll unrolls in stylized battles of the orient: two thousand years of war from Mongol invaders driven back by women warriors. In every village there is a house of Tradition There the history of the village is preserved for everyone to see Not in monuments to famous men or markers of the big battles only, but here, this gun brought down a plane THis trap guarded the gate this letter, written by a 10 year old girl who died in the bombing The blood of the past waters our We honor those who went before. The same li fought over many times, the same road, built and destroyed and then rebuilt and again destroyed Read the French battle annals: An Ke, Cu Chi, Route 13 the wrecked shells of transports line those impenetrable roads- carts, wagons, then jeeps and trucks and now the helicoptersanger"
"LSD, and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace."
"We are fighting in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlows long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground."
"Last night we blew up the hall of injustice, Marin County Civic Center. We dedicate this act to the prisoners of San Quentin, Soledad and New York, and to all black prisoners of war. Fighting, where there is not place to hide they have turned every prison in Amerika into an advance guerilla post of the war against Pig Amerika. We dedicate it to the heroic prisoners of O Wing and the other inmates of Soledad Prison who retaliated for the murder of three of their leaders y executing two pig guards, and to the incredible courage of the brothers who seized and held the prisons of New York, and who faced the most vicious reprisals with their fist in the air."
"On Saturday, August 21, 1971, George Jackson, black warrior, revolutionary leader, political prisoner, was shot dead by racist forces at San Quentin. Murdered for what he had become: Soledad Brother, soldier of his people, rising up through torment and torture, tyanny and injustice, unwilling to bow or bend to his oppressors. George Jackson died with his eyes fixed clearly on freedom"
"-"There are too many people in the world and not enough food." -No, we said, a few control the world's food. Food as weapon Food as profit."
"Mirror of history mirror of war, fear of the feast-breeding poor. "It is cheaper to kill a guerilla in the womb than in the mountains" Genocide."
"Upside down planning from the rich they should be planting seeds not coils and shields. The poor will inherit the right to their fertile land."
"Underground is not the right word it makes it seem too simple, as if there is an easy way to disappear a place to go."
"Once upon a time, in an age long, long ago, determined bands of young people rebelled against the Empire. Embedded within the heart of empire, the belly of the beast, the mother country, young people in North America awakened to a unique responsibility: to refuse to go along with what was being done in our name in Vietnam or in Hattiesburg. Neutrality was not an option. We felt impelled to act, to interrupt, to educate - without knowing what was next, or how history would judge u. One such band was Weather."
"The concept of Protracted War best describes the history of the Puerto Rican people. For many centuries our people have been invaded by one nation or another. Two oppressors were successful, the spaniards in 1493, and the yankees in 1898."
"1. WE WANT SELF-DETERMINATION FOR PUERTO RICANS—LIBERATION ON THE ISLAND AND INSIDE THE UNITED STATES. For 500 years, first spain and then the united states have colonized our country. Billions of dollars in profits leave our country for the united states every year. In every way we are slaves of the gringo. We want liberation and the Power in the hands of the People, not Puerto Rican exploiters. QUE VIVA PUERTO RICO LIBRE!"
"4. WE ARE REVOLUTIONARY NATIONALISTS AND OPPOSE RACISM. The Latin, Black, Indian and Asian people inside the u.s. are colonies fighting for liberation. We know that washington, wall street, and city hall will try to make our nationalism into racism, but Puerto Ricans are of all colors and we resist racism. Millions of poor white people are rising up to demand freedom and we support them. These are the ones in the u.s. that are stepped on by the rulers and the government. We each organize our people, but our fights are the same against oppression and we will defeat it together. POWER TO ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLE!"
"As Iris Morales notes, "Even those who disagreed with our tactics had to agree the injustices we pointed to were clear.... The organization touched people of conscience in our community.""
"the Young Lords' emphasis on group advancement provides a compelling counternarrative to the politics of liberal individualism."
"Of the various organizations that constituted the Puerto Rican movement, the Young Lords left the most lasting legacy."
"Its effectiveness in using the mass media helped the Young Lords to organize some of the largest and most successful demonstrations of the Puerto Rican left (including a 1970 march of 10,000 from El Barrio (East Harlem) to the United Nations to protest police brutality and the colonial status of Puerto Rico)."
"While Chicanos in the Southwest sought to emulate the paramilitary style of the Black Panthers by forming groups such as the Brown Berets, it was Puerto Rican organizations like the Young Lords that most self-consciously modeled themselves on the Black Power movement."
"the Afro-Caribbean origins of Puerto Ricans make them people who have had to continually negotiate the black-white racial divide, both in the United States and in Puerto Rico. In the organization's analysis of race, the Young Lords explored the differences between Afro-Boricuas (Puerto Rican blacks) and Jibros (light-skinned Creoles). Capturing this distinction between light-and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans, Pablo Guzmán claimed, "before they called me a spic, they called me a nigger." The resignation of Young Lords leader Denise Oliver and her subsequent membership in the Black Panther Party is further testimony to the close and interconnected political and racial relationship between Puerto Rican and African American leftists during this period."
"The Young Lords understood themselves to be a revolutionary nationalist party with an internationalist vision. According to Melendez, three texts formed the core of the Young Lords' political education program: Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book, and Che Guevara's Man and Socialism: Transformation of the Individual. Grounded in Mao's critique of nationalism and Fanon's analysis of colonialism, as well as Vladimir Lenin's writings on imperialism and the national question, the nationalism of the Young Lords was much more ideologically explicit than that of most Chicano leaders."
"Inspired by Che Guevara, the Young Lords sought to engage the internal struggle of the individual "to manifest change within himself in order to create a revolution in society.""