Solo la opresión debe temer al pleno ejercicio de la libertad. Libertad es el derecho que todo hombre tiene a ser honrado, y a pensar y a hablar sin hipocresía. Un hombre que oculta lo que piensa, o no se atreve a decir lo que piensa, no es un hombre honrado. Un hombre que obedece a un mal gobierno, sin trabajar para que el gobierno sea bueno, no es un hombre honrado.
José Martí
The colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope. But to ensure that hope and to give it form, he must take part in action and throw himself body and soul into the national struggle.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963)
Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1971)
It is with the intention of making a contribution, however modest, to this debate that we present here our opinion of the foundations and objectives of national liberation in relation to the social structure. This opinion is the result of our own experiences of the struggle and of a critical appreciation of the experiences of others. To those who see in it a theoretical character, we would recall that every practice produces a theory, and that if it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.
Amilcar Cabral, ”The Weapon of Theory” (1966)
The truth is that one cannot choose the form of war one wants, unless from the start one has a crushing superiority over the enemy. It is well-known what losses were incurred by the stubborn refusal of the General Staffs to acknowledge that a war of position was ‘imposed’ by the overall relation of forces in conflict. A war of position is not, in reality, constituted simply by actual trenches, but by the whole organizational and industrial system of the territory which lies to the back of the army in the field.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971)
The divorce between the electoral left and social movements has no solution: There are too many material interests and too much complicity with the state apparatus to think there could be a shift. The electoral left is not the enemy of movements, but its access to state power can do it irreparable harm if the movements do not have sufficient autonomy.
Raúl Zibechi, Territories in Resistance (2012), p. 293.
Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1993)
Where the Establishment proclaims its professional killers as heroes, and its rebelling victims as criminals, it is hard to save the idea of heroism for the other side. The desperate act, doomed to failure, may for a brief moment tear the veil of justice and expose the faces of brutal suppression; it may arouse the conscience of neutrals; it may reveal hidden cruelties and lies.
Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972)
I think that women from other places in the world, especially the West, should reflect at length about what has happened to the Marxist-feminist proposal, socialist-feminism; what has happened to those proposals in their respective countries? Because let’s say that we have had some currents which have broken away and have stayed within the arena of simply making liberal demands. They don’t organize towards the transformation or the surmounting of exploitation or the patriarchy, viewed as the complimentary functional system to capitalism.
Meglimar Melero, Feminist Spider Network, “Interview: Without Socialism, There Can be No True Feminism”
