cian 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇵🇸

“I have no whit of sympathy for Gaddafi, any more than I did for Miloševič when we were bombing Belgrade, for Saddam Hussein when the Americans were putting Iraq to fire and the sword […] But I am categorically opposed to the principal brigands of the contemporary world in concert pulling the confidence trick on us, with the quavering voices of their media ideologues, of ‘morality’ and ‘democracy’, in order to go and crush remote, weak countries, and conduct their interminable wars, and profit from these circumstances to establish themselves there, plunder the local resources, and set up permanent military bases.”

“A great man springs from the mass and is carried by circumstances: the mass of women is at the fringes of history, and for each of them, circumstances are an obstacle and not a springboard. To change the face of the world, one has first to be firmly anchored to it; but women firmly rooted in society are those subjugated by it; unless they are designated for action by divine right - and in this case they are shown to be as capable as men - the ambitious woman and the heroine are strange monsters. Only since women have begun to feel at home on this earth has a Rosa Luxemburg or a Mme Curie emerged. They brilliantly demonstrate that it is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance: it is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.”

“It is right to rebel”

“More than other writers, Marx wrote in the conjuncture […] it was certainly incompatible with stable conclusions: Marx is the philosopher of eternal new beginnings, leaving behind him many uncompleted drafts and projects. The content of his thought is not separable from his shifts of position. That is why, in studying him, one cannot abstractly reconstruct his system. One has to retrace his development, with its breaks and bifurcations.”

"We must carry this through to its conclusion and say that this overdetermination does not just refer to apparently unique and aberrant historical situations (Germany, for example), but is universal; the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes"

“For when you reduce the Cultural Revolution to this type of episode, this is the stuff of the black legend, a reactionary and ridiculous legend. You are like Dumas fils, who saw nothing in the Paris Commune but petroleuses [arsonist women] in rags. Why not mention, among a thousand other truly astonishing episodes, the case of the port of Shanghai, paralysed by previous struggles, which got set running again when it was taken over by an absolutely novel, practical alliance between the students and workers?”