Nathan Levin

“Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, Leninism or Marxism? Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy

“The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.”
― Frederick Douglass , My Bondage and My Freedom

“Ideological conformity depends on conditions of prosperity; it has no staying-power of its own.”
― Paul Mattick

“Douglass keenly grasped the plight of the white poor. In their “craftiness,” wrote Douglass, urban slaveholders and shipyard owners forged an “enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks,” forcing an embittered scramble for diminished wages, and rendering the white worker “as much a slave as the black slave himself.” Both were “plundered, and by the same plunderer.” The “white slave” and the “black slave” were both robbed, one by a single master, and the other by the entire slave system. The slaveholding class exploited the lethal tools of racism to convince the burgeoning immigrant poor, said Douglass, that “slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom