Connexions Quotations
The Left
Quotes
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The energies of much of the left are devoted to issuing appeals to the capitalist state to fix our problems, or to looking for ways to fix the state as if it had somehow accidentally gone off track. The left has always been attracted to the state the way a moth is attracted to a flame, and the darker it gets, the more it is attracted to statist and nationalist illusions.
- Ulli Diemer
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How sour and bitter most left writing on culture has become.
Sometimes it sounds as if culture were just one more Department of Exploitation and Oppression,
containing nothing luminous or valuable in itself. At other times,
it sounds as if people’s minds were empty vessels with nothing inside except what Capital put there.
Read, or try to read, a few articles on “hegemonic/counterhegemonic discourse.”
The way these guys write, it’s as if the world has passed them by.
- Marshall Berman
Adventures in Marxism
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The left has always been attracted to the state the way a moth is attracted to a flame,
and the darker it gets, the more it is attracted to statist and nationalist illusions.
- Ulli Diemer
- Ulli Diemer
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The Left has engaged in the futile pursuit of “moving the NDP to the left” since 1933,
achieving pretty much the same result as a dog chasing its tail.
- Ulli Diemer
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The physical threat posed by climate change represents a crisis that is not only material but also profoundly spiritual at its core because it challenges us to think seriously about the future of the human race and what it means to be a human being.
- Grace Lee Boggs
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Revolutionary socialists have been accused for many years of wanting to overthrow the US government by force and violence. When they accuse us of this, what they are really trying to do is to imply that we want to abolish capitalism with a minority, that we want to force the will of the minority on the majority. The opposite is the truth. We believe we can win a majority of the people in this country to support a change in the system.
- Peter Camejo
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There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like ‘mathematics for the millions’ (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns.
- Noam Chomsky
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There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.
- Ella Baker
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To learn more about the Left, explore the Connexions Subject Index Left page and the Left History page.
