new-left

"the Young Lords' emphasis on group advancement provides a compelling counternarrative to the politics of liberal individualism."

"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.""

"Of the various organizations that constituted the Puerto Rican movement, the Young Lords left the most lasting legacy."

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"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.""

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"-"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."

"Profit chases greed in a reckless race across the Earth"

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."