The revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.
Interpretation
Revolutions happen when oppressed individuals refuse to comply with their oppressors.
The quote by Karl Hess emphasizes the power of non-cooperation in the face of oppression. When individuals who are wronged or victimized choose to stop supporting or complying with systems that exploit or harm them, it can lead to significant societal change and even revolutionary movements. This highlights the importance of individual agency and solidarity in challenging unjust systems.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social change, one might say, 'As Karl Hess stated, the revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.'
It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.
We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.
They [anarchists] spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that itβs all choice and chance.
What we want is that one day every workplace will be diverse - we already encourage that with gender and ethnicity, but the next frontier is neurodiversity and it will become ordinary. People won't think twice about it.
I would be excited if we could reimagine workplaces that start from a premise that women are going to be a central part: Women are going to bear children, people are going to raise those children, and it's not going to be a nuisance - it's actually going to be understood as part of the deal.
No thieves, no traitors, no interventionists! This time the revolution is for real!
The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change.
I recalled how much time i had spent fighting for something i didn't even want. maybe because i had been too lazy to think of other avenues to follow. maybe because i had been afraid of what others would think. maybe because it was hard work to be different. perhaps, because a human being is condemned to repeat the steps taken by the previous generation until a certain number of people begin to behave in a different fashion. then the world changes, and we change with it.
The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
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