Marxists

"Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton, murdered by a different faction of his own country's left, wrote in his poem "Todos," "Altogether they have more death than we, but altogether we have more life than they." For this to be true, we must hold a larger vision of what is possible than the people who kill and torture and ravage."

"Las leyes son para que las cumplan los pobres. Las leyes son hechas por los ricos para poner un poco de orden a la explotación. Los pobres son los únicos cumplidores de leyes de la historia. Cuando los pobres hagan las leyes ya no habrá ricos."

"The ones who filled the bars and brothels... the ones who were mowed down with bullets while crossing the border, the ones who barely made it back... the eternal illegals... the saddest sad people in the world, my countrymen, my brothers."

"You’ve already eaten the body of Francisco Morazán... and now you want to eat Honduras You need to be slapped given electric shocks psychoanalysed to return to your true self"

"The death of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton in 1975 is one of the great tragedies of Latin American literature and of the Latin American left... Most of his best writing came during his exile in Cuba, where he wrote seven books of poetry, and Miguel Marmol,a biography of a 1930s Salvadoran revolutionary that’s one of the great, underappreciated masterpieces of Latin American historical writing."

"Back in San Salvador... aware that the police were looking for him again, Dalton broke the rules of life underground and, as he put it... ‘exercised my right to go out and drink a beer’. The police found him on a bar stool and ‘disappeared’ him... Dalton... was interrogated by a CIA agent. The military planned to kill him, the American told him, but he had come to offer him a way out. ‘It won’t be just any life...but a life with all the possibilities... where we have every resource available, in France, in Chile, in England. You should live like a writer, like a scholar, not like a criminal. Why die now, like a fool?’ Dalton wasn’t swayed, and after several nights the American tried a final ruse. The CIA, he promised, would use its operatives in the Salvadoran Communist Party to spread the word that Dalton had co-operated. ‘We’ll tell them that before dying you tried to save your skin... You won’t go down in history as a hero but as a traitor.’ Dalton was shaken, but he didn’t talk..."

"Born in 1935, Dalton was the illegitimate son of a U.S. coffee plantation owner and a Mexican single mother... educated by the Jesuits... He blamed their hypocrisy and support for the status quo for his break with Catholicism. One of his first political acts was a high school valedictory speech blasting his teachers for their tacit support of the school caste system by which poor children were demeaned."

"None of those who witnessed Dalton’s death have been willing to talk in public about what happened. His son Juan José, now a journalist, says that former members of the ERP... told his family in Cuba in 1978 that it was Villalobos who killed Dalton... the life Villalobos leads today resembles the one promised to Dalton by the CIA in 1964, ‘a life with all the possibilities’"

"Kardelj had had many years of preparation for his postWorld War II role as theoretician of Yugoslav socialism. There was a two-year internship, from late 1934 to early 1937, first as a student, then as a lecturer of MarxismLeninism, in the USSR. There were the prison confinements in Yugoslavia (in Pozarevac from 1930 to 1932 and two detentions in Liubljana in 1938) which allowed time to read and meditate. Such prison stays seem to have been particularly productive spiritually and intellectually for political detainees. During these internments Kardelj reviewed literature on Slovene history and formulated his seminal work, Razvoj slovenskega narodnega vprasanja ("The Development of the Slovene National Question"), which was published in 1939 under the pseudonym of Sperans."

"What struck Broz most about Kardelj was his steadfastness and his calm, equable temperament. He was also favorably impressed by the quiet efficiency with which he did his work. Efficiency was a quality by which Broz set great store. 'Kardelj was so quiet,' he said many years later, 'that you hardly noticed him at first; but decisions were made, aims were achieved, and then you realized that it was he who had made the proposal, persuaded others to accept it, and put it into effect. No setback dismayed him. He was free of pretense and bluff. He eschewed fractionalism. His mind dwelt on essentials. After my first meeting with him I had no doubt that he was an honest man and a true revolutionary.'"

"As social institutions, universities act to maintain the hierarchical nature of the status quo by excluding most of the population from its classrooms while ensuring that a small number are trained and certified to supervise others. In Gramscian terms, in the post-Civil Rights era black academics have functioned and continue to function as intellectuals in particular and politically contradictory ways in the "ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities have their place within the general complex of social relations." Are we meant to function as the black gatekeepers, ensuring the production, perpetuation, and maintenance of a small, black, middle-class elite, in the hope that this elite will act as a force to control the rebellious tendencies of the black oppressed?"

"I want to concur with Mr. Perry’s proposal to Mr. Lane that he recommend to the Department of Justice that they show more zeal, since they have not ever prosecuted a single anti-Semite or a Ku Kluxer in these United States with its total of 5,000 lynched Negro men, women and Children since the 1860s."

"One need only be a Negro in America to know that for the crime of being a Negro we are daily convicted by a Government which denies us elementary democratic rights, the right to vote, to hold office, to hold judgeships, to serve on juries, rights forcibly denied in the South and also in the North."

"one of the historical truths of all history is that the oppressed never revere their oppressors."

"It was the great Frederick Douglass, who had a price on his head, who said “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And echoing his words was the answer of the great abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell: “The limits of tyranny is proscribed by the measure of our resistance to it”."

"And this, Honourable Judge, is exactly what is the purpose of all Smith Act trials, this one in particular. I share the faith of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Pettis Perry and all my c –defendants that America’s working people, Negro and white, will surely rise, not like sheep, but with vigilance towards their liberty, to assure that peace will win and that the decadent Smith Act, which contravenes the Bill of Rights, will be swept from the scene of history."

"racist ideas, so integral a part of the desperate drive by the men of Wall Street to war and fascism"

"The thinking process, as your Honour well knows, is a process that defies jailing."

"One thought pervaded me throughout this trial and pervades me still, and it is this: In the nine and one half months of this trial, millions of children have been born. I speak only of those who live. Will the future oft those children, including those of our defendants and even you Honour’s grandchildren, be made more secure by the jailing of 13 men and women Communists whose crimes are not criminal acts but advocacy of ideas? Is this not a tyrannical violation of the American dream of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?"

"I find now, as throughout this trial of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, that it is we, the defendants, who are morally free and conversely it is the prosecutors and the Court itself that stands naked before the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the people of our country."

"Will you measure as worth of one year’s sentence, my passionate adherence to the idea of fighting for full unequivocal equality for my people, the Negro people, which as a Communist I believe can only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class? A year for another vital Communist belief, that the bestial Korean War is an unjust war? Or my belief that peaceful coexistence of nations can be achieved and peace won if struggled for? Another year for my belief that only under socialism will exploitation of and by man be finally abolished and the great human and industrial resources of the nation be harnessed for the well-being of the people? Still another year’s sentence for my belief that the denial of the exercise of free speech and thought to Communists only precedes, as history confirms, the denial of the exercise of these rights to all Americans?"

"It was the world-renowned Karl Marx, founder of the Marxist-Leninist science, for which application to American and world historical conditions, we were so fearfully convicted, who long ago predicted that “The time would come when the powers that would be would no longer live by the very laws they themselves have fashioned.”"

"I had early experience experiences which are shared by millions of native-born Negroes — the bitter indignity and humiliation of second-class citizenship, the special status which makes a mockery of our Government’s prated claims of a “free America” in a “free world” for 15 million Negro Americans."

"A developing consciousness on the woman question today, therefore, must not fail to recognize that the Negro question in the United States is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people and fight for the full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights. For the progressive women's movement, the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to this heightened political consciousness."

"if what I say here serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile indeed."

"Marxism-Leninism — that philosophy that not only rejects racists ideas, but is the antithesis of them."

"If, out of this struggle, history assesses that I and my co-defendants have made some small contribution, I shall consider my role small indeed. The glorious exploits of anti-fascist heroes and heroines, honoured today in all lands for their contribution to social progress, will, just like the role of our prosecutors, also be measured by the people of the United States in that coming day."

"As Carole Boyce Davies has pointed out in her wonderful book on Claudia Jones, Left of Karl Marx, Claudia Jones was one of the leaders of the Negro Youth Congress (the American Negro Youth Congress and the Southern Youth Congress). And I mention Jones both because of her important work in the US and because she became a pivotal figure in the organizing of Caribbean communities here in Britain after she was arrested for the work she did in the US and eventually deported. How can we counteract the representation of historical agents as powerful individuals, powerful male individuals, in order to reveal the part played, for example, by Black women domestic workers in the Black freedom movement?"

"The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question. As we've seen, key interventions by the likes of Ida B. Wells or Claudia Jones attempted to disrupt color- and class-struggle-as-usual, but few leftists paid attention."

"My feminism is the feminism of Claudia Jones, whose experiences of intense racism and working-class poverty led her to communism, who proposed Black self-determination as a guiding principle of communist organizing and was jailed for an anti-imperialist Women's Day speech. She criticized the left for failing to uproot male supremacy, and the elite feminists who ignored race and class and framed their struggles as a war between the sexes, and wrote that "the triply oppressed status of negro women is a barometer of the status of all women.""

"I will be strong to keep my mind and soul outside a prison,/Encouraged and inspired by ever loving memories of you."

"The Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Foley Square case on June 4, 1951. Just over two weeks later FBI agents in New York rounded up such "second string" leaders as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Pettis Perry, and Claudia Jones. After that we knew it couldn't be long before the arrests came in other places."

"Whereas for Claudia Jones the structural position of black people-black women in particular-in the political economy placed them in the vanguard of the revolution, for Paul Robeson it was their culture that gave the black movement its special insight and character."

"The other great tragedy, for the black freedom movement in particular, was the silencing of radical leadership. Robeson, Du Bois, and Claudia Jones were among the many victims of statesponsored anticommunist witch hunts."

"The proletariat has lost a valiant fighter in her. But her mourning father has at least the consolation that hundreds of thousands of workers in Europe and America share his sorrow."

"Jenny Marx was born on May 1, 1844, grew up in the midst of the international proletarian movement and most closely together with it. Despite a reticence that could almost be taken for shyness, she displayed when necessary a presence of mind and energy which could be envied by many a man."

"John McDonnell, the nearest to a hero in both books. McDonnell worked tirelessly and pragmatically. He wanted to win, knowing that unity and a semblance of coherence were fundamental preconditions for victory. He kept up a dialogue with the so-called moderates and spoke out publicly on both anti-Semitism and the Salisbury poisonings, to the point where he and Corbyn did not talk for several months."

"My view is that you'd put the deal to the people, but you'd have to also have the option of the status quo. Deep in my heart, I'm still a Remainer, but I've got to try and bring together effectively what is a British compromise."

"The values of Catholicism are the inherent values of the Labour Party and the inherent values of socialism..."

"I think he's reckless and I think he's unstable and I will move heaven and Earth to stop a no-deal Brexit."

"My fear is that if we did have another referendum, we might get the same or similar result and the country will still be divided. Somehow we have got to try and bring the country back together again."

"If the government says 'well a customs union for a couple of years or maybe customs union until we decide there won't be one,' well actually, that doesn't give the stability for investment for anyone"

"Therefore now in the national interest we have got to come together and secure a compromise. If we can't do that, well yes, we have to go back to the people."

"If Jeremy got hit by the No 57 bus, or whatever it is, there's the next generation coming through. And the reality is the next leader should be a woman. It's high time to have a woman."

"That has been our objective since immediately after the referendum. The structures - whether we are in or out - are a secondary matter. We are not ruling anything out but what we are saying is that we are the fifth largest economy in the world and we have a special status in both our relationship with the EU and the rest of the globe and we feel we can get a deal that achieves tariff-free access."

"Our objective is tariff-free access to the market"

"We voted for the implementation of Article 50 because we respect the referendum result. But we cannot have this situation where government becomes unaccountable on the implementation of one of the most important decisions for a generation."

"This means we must not try to re-fight the referendum or push for a second vote and if Article 50 needs to be triggered in Parliament Labour will not seek to block or delay it."

"We should not pretend the referendum result can be undone."

"We will be cut off from our biggest trading partner. We will be cut off from the skills and contribution that EU nationals have made to our economy and society."