The Outside Agitator

August 28, 2014

“In 1939, General Marshall and the US military authorities, aided by the government, organized fourteen million men and women. They washed them and dressed them and cleaned up their teeth and taught them to read, those who could not read. And then in two or three years they had them ready- for what? To go abroad, all over the world, fighting against people who had done the same thing on the opposite side. What is the purpose of these suicidal, these tremendous efforts on the part of human beings only to destroy one another?

"I believe it is possible to mobilize even more tens of millions of people for the work and the arts of peace. Properly encouraged and given a sense of history and a sense of destiny, they will do all they now do for war, for the sake of improving the normal life and relations of human beings. (applause) But this will come only when people are their own masters.

"That for me is what Marxism is, and we must not be afraid, we must not think because we are small and insignificant that we are not able to take part in all that is taking place. The first thing is to know. Anyone who tries to prevent you from knowing, from learning anything, is an enemy, an enemy of freedom, of equality, of democracy. Those ideas, and the desire to make them real, have inspired people for countless centuries. Marxism is the doctrine which believes that freedom, equality, democracy are today possible for all humankind.”

— C.L.R. James, 1960 lectures in Trinidad.

7:18pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/Z0TBiw1PSGmkw
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(Notes: 31)