Julian

“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience…”
― E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

“Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age Of Empire 1875-1914

“Maximum awareness and respect for the scholarship of historians outside the boundaries of Marxism is not incompatible with rigorous pursuit of a Marxist historical enquiry: it is a condition of it. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it.”
― Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism

“La tradición de todas las generaciones muertas oprime como una pesadilla el cerebro de los vivos.”
― Karl Marx