Madeline’s Reviews > Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays > Status Update

“Politics is not simply interpersonal relations. Politics is a mass motion of people committed to changing the system. You find your allies in the street! You don’t find them in the bedroom, you find them in the street. If you’re facing the police down, and you lock arms with the person next to you, you’ve got an ally.”

2/2 - “because the law is part of the array of mechanisms that we are struggling against. If they are just apologizing for the way, things are, and are putting limitations on your struggle, you can draw the line right there.”

1/2 “One way to determine who is your ally is to look at how people conceptualize the movement. If they conceptualize the movement as a changing of attitudes, a change of individual consciousness, or are emphasizing individual heroes, then these ppl don’t have the same vision that you have. Allies are people who look at these things as systematic and institutionalized, and are prepared to break the existing law

“A protest is when you’re picketing or trying to get somebody to understand your position on something, in the hopes that they will enact some kind of change or reform. Direct action is when you’re trying to interfere and disrupt something that is going on by some kind of collective motion. It’s change that we create ourselves. It’s part of the creativity of the movement.”

“anytime you come to the point in history where one nation state has the weaponry to destroy everything living on this planet just to maintain itself, you’ve got to know that there’s something pathologically wrong. It’s pathological to say, “we are going to destroy everything in the world so that we can have a safe democracy in America.”

“it seems to me like some people can go along with a movement, but when it gets down to breaking a window or throwing a brick through something, they want to draw the line. But that’s how the whole legal system is based. All the laws in capitalist society exist to protect property, and if you can’t get beyond that, you’re lost.”

2/2 - “Government sees some kind of need, which defines based on its own interests, and then institutes whatever program, whatever policy- war policy or welfare policy- it needs to stay afloat. Historians often write about policy as if it appears in a vacuum.”

1/2 “the policy of a government is epiphenomenal, meaning it is always a response to something. When I say epiphenomenal, I mean something that appears to be real but is not real in the form that it appears. For instance, moonlight does not come from the moon, but it’s the sunlight reflected by the moon. So too are these policies really reflections of social movement. Policies do not initiate anything.”

“My whole view is that we need to understand that our authority and validity are derived from ourselves and our social struggle, not from whatever state power happens to govern over us.”

“This healthy disrespect for authority must be guided by an understanding of history. When you look at the nation states of the world, you find that they have perpetrated violence for the last 400 years. There are people- Frenchmen, Americans, Nigerians- who fight to preserve the interests of their nation state. I am none of these people. I am not a nationalist.”