“What we lack is the creative faculty to imagine what we know; what we lack is the generous impulse to accomplish what we imagine; what we lack is the poetry of life…” (Shelley)
“He who surrenders himself completely to the present is condemned to react endlessly to accomplished facts. (…) He who does not find the strength to dream will not find the strength to fight.“ (Oscar Negt)
“There is liberation only for those who put themselves internally and externally in a position to leave capitalism, who cease to play a role and begin to be human.” (Gustav Landauer)
“The moment to take the initiative never comes for those who are waiting for the ‘objective conditions’ to mark their hour in history.” (Jaime Semprun)
“I have always felt the ‘refusal to achieve’. Thus, I have never held a position in the labor movement. I have taken on tasks and responsibilities, certainly, but not for money and without ever having a particular status. I have always been in situations where I was eligible and revocable. I would never have wanted to have a permanent position. It doesn’t appeal to me at all; this way I keep my freedom and I can really express what I think. I don’t want to brag, but I know that as soon as you receive money, you are no longer your own master because you have to identify with the people who pay you. Suddenly, you lose your independence. For me, it was important never to hold a position; if it had been offered to me, I would have refused it.“ (Paul Mattick)
“Our war would be a war of withdrawal. We would have to contain the enemy with the silent threat of a vast and unknown desert, only revealing ourselves at the moment of attack.” (T. E. Lawrence)
“I needed to imagine radically different worlds because even the narratives that came to me managed to restrain this exploration. I resisted by imagining not resisting. I resisted by wanting to escape the narratives of resistance that always conformed to systems of oppression.” (Elena Aguilar Gil)
“I always stayed as far away from the system as possible. I never had a real job, I did odd jobs. It is of course a personal choice that involves some acrobatics and that you cannot demand from anyone else. In any case, I don’t know how I could have lived any other way, even if it is at the cost of a certain precariousness. Because the fact is that you are never paid for being free. So I find it difficult to have a critical relationship with this world, while being paid to exercise a certain power in it. Unfortunately, this is now as much the case with intellectuals, mainly academics, as with artists, who are increasingly seeking subsidies. So it should come as no surprise that intellectuals, with a few exceptions, have fewer and fewer qualms about justifying what is, while artists allow themselves to be reduced to the role of cultural entertainers. There is no such thing as life on one side and thought or art on the other. For me, this is the major inconsistency at the root of the current triumph of insignificance.” (Annie Le Brun)
“The urgent need is not to defend ‘freedoms’, but to reinvent freedom. The programmed decline of partial freedoms is only the other side of the triumph of a debased conception of human freedom, reduced to that which the market and technical system demands.” (Groupe Marcuse)
“The modern idea of freedom was formed against the backdrop of the closed worlds of yesteryear, of village life or in small neighborhoods, with their gossip and their local social control. Economic independence and direct contact with nature have been sacrificed to this desire for anonymity. Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, anonymity – which has gained ground in many rural areas – no longer offers any protection. Freedom is not achieved by fleeing our humanity but by developing it in a different way. (Groupe Marcuse)
“It is because the virtualities of the current system are taking shape without encountering opposition that we seem to be heading for a completely integrated totalitarian society. To stand in the way of this movement, the oppressed classes would have to ‘free themselves from themselves and from their masters at the same time’.” (Paul Mattick)
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
Rebound :