lena ∵

“Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth. ... Today by a natural reaction we tend to a personification of the social forces, great men being merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny. As so often the truth does not lie in between. Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. ... In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“But nothing, however profitable, goes on for ever. From the very momentum of their own development, colonial planters, French and British bourgeois, were generating internal stresses and intensifying external rivalries, moving blindly to explosions and conflicts which would shatter the basis of their dominance and create the possibility of emancipation.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“How exactly should we envisage the process whereby a movement, mobilised precisely on the basis of its abstraction from the prevailing conditions of class and class-interest and a deliberate detachment of its aims from a fundamental challenge to the existing structure of social relations and domination, might be transformed into a stable collective forces directed against those class-conditions and that structure of domination? Unless, of course, the movement itself becomes the terrain of class-struggle.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader

“Without theoretical consciousness, without the need to express it in articulate language, but making their statement with their bodies and their actions, they cried out that there can be no civil and political equality as long as there is economic inequality, and that the way to end this inequality is not with laws, decrees, lectures and sermons, but by overthrowing by force the bases of a society divided into classes.”
― Amadeo Bordiga, The Science and Passion of Communism : Selected Writings of Amadeo Bordiga