Wendell Phillips - Noam Chomsky - Samuel Gompers - Joe Hill - Tony Mazzocchi - Theodore Roosevelt - Paul Foot - Tom Peters -
Organize, and stand together. Claim something together, and at once; let the nation hear a united demand from the laboring voice, and then, when you have got that, go on after another; but get something. Wendell Phillips
Killing is just superficial; it’s just the icing on the cake. I mean there’s plenty of repression short of killing. And it’s tough. People lose their jobs, they get blacklisted … There’s all kinds of ways of getting rid of people who are troublemakers from kindergarten up. And organising succeeds when people are willing to face those pressures and overcome them. And it’s hard to know what the secret is; sometimes people do it … For us it’s a picnic; what we call repression, in most of the world would be called a gift. I mean, go to a place like El Salvador and try to organise there; there it’s not a matter of they don’t like you, you end up in a ditch cut to pieces after torture - that’s what it means to organise there: they still do it, they keep coming back. Noam Chomsky, lecture 1992, ‘Deterring Democracy’
Democratic forms can be tolerated, even admired, if only for propaganda purposes. But this stance can be adopted only when the distribution of effective power ensures that meaningful participation of the ‘popular classes’ had been barred. When they organize and threaten the control of the political system by the business-landowner elite and the military, strong measures must be taken, with tactical variations depending on the ranking of the target population on the scale of importance. At the lowest rank, in the Third World, virtually no holds are barred. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
You can’t do it unless you organize. Samuel Gompers
Don’t mourn for me – organise! Joe Hill
There is a dawn approaching that is indicating and shouting to us that it’s our moment. But we’ve got to seize that moment and use what we know so well – how to organize and, fundamentally, how to fight! Tony Mazzocchi, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, speech 1998
It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize. Theodore Roosevelt
Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labour. While every previous form of society was an organization of labour in the interests of a minority, which organized its state apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labour in the interests of the labouring majority itself. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism
The very earliest groups of working people in Britain who met together to oppose emerging capitalism called themselves Corresponding Societies, combinations, associations, all words which highlighted the joining together of people in common cause against their oppressors.
Nothing could be more obvious than that the strength and power of class society requires an equivalent strength and power to change it, and that on our side that strength and power depends upon socialists joining together and acting in common purpose. Paul Foot, article July 1989, ‘The Question Lingers On’
Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It’s about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it’s about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules. Tom Peters