The following represent a random sampling of voices from those activists and organizers who participated in our research project. To see more, refresh this page. Use the tag cloud to the right to navigate by theme.
Capitalism, motivation, and social reproduction
I11
I think it's really foolish to think that if the competition of capitalism was taken away or if the goal of money were taken away that people wouldn't do things…[that] people would just sit around. No, people will maintain roads if they’re important roads, and maintain the public systems that they use or whatever, or grow food, but we won't do things like build $6 000 000 passing lanes in spots we don't need them...
Reconsidering the end goals
I31
We need to change the end goal. Is the end goal about economic growth and increasing wealth or is the end goal...human well-being and quality of life? There is a really rich discourse around those things - gross national happiness and genuine progress indicators and those sorts of things. It's not enough just to do the academic research and come up with these ideas, there has to be direct correlations within the politics.
Other worlds are possible
I5
The Zapatistas offered a vision that other worlds were still possible. That a radical struggle against global capitalism could be engaged in that people could come together in a spirit of affinity and solidarity and actually not try and just dominate and control each other with a singular blueprint of the world or what the world could be. And I found that all very inspiring. And the fact that it was communicated through parables, through myth, through allegory, through poetry, through symbolic demonstration as much as through an armed uprising I found really powerful.
Reproducing violence
I20
One of the things...I saw a little bit while working in other countries that had had big revolutions, like Cambodia for example or some Latin American countries, is sometimes the revolution is as frightening as what was there before. It may change the power...but it doesn't seem to change what happens to people in terms of violence in their day to day life [or allow better] access to the things that they fought for. So I guess some element of me is as leery of what we will do in the name of change...
Violence and social change
I10
I think that there is a time and place for violence and it's different in different countries. I want to say that it isn't justified but, at the same time, if that is the only way that you will get your message across and that is the only way that you can change something and make the people in power listen [then you can’t dismiss it]... but it's definitely less accepted in our society then it is in other countries like in South America or even in Europe. But I think that it's a short lived activism. It's kind of like you light a fuse and then the fuse burns down, and down, and down and finally you have an explosion but after that explosion what is there? There's ash and bits of charred ground and I don't think that, in and of itself, can make lasting change. But there is a time and place for that explosion.
Imagining the future together
I21
I'm sitting on this side of the river saying ‘I'm happy to cross over with you,’ I don't know what the bridge looks like, but I think we have to sustain this bank of the river so that it doesn't collapse on our way to that one. Because I do not have sufficient radical imagination to know how we're going to get from here to what I imagine for the future, I don't have that. I don't think that gives me an excuse not to keep on keeping on because I think the struggle against slavery in the United States took four hundred years. I've been working for about forty and not consistently….I'm saddened that I don't have the imagination to understand [how] we're going to get from a and b but I think we need to discuss how we're going to get from a to b together because there are smarter people than me.
Leadership and revolution
I23
...a belief in intrinsic spontaneity of the masses to be revolutionary without hard, slogging leadership….[is a] disease...
Pulling up oppression by the roots
I29
...removing patriarchy and sexism...would create such a ripple effect that there would be so much more potential. I think that a lot of what goes on that is negative can be traced to those roots.
A rock and a hard place
I23
Yes, socialism is still necessary but at the present moment if there is no real socialist possibility we might have to bite the bullet and become involved in reform activities which we have very little hope in. That's the present tragic dilemma of the Left and of the world.
The state and class rule
I22
The Canadian state itself is an instrument of class rule, and the Canadian state itself...has been deployed...against workers, against progressive peopl[e], against the First Nations, against minorities….The Canadian state[‘s]...foundations are colonial, we only have to talk about what happened to the First Nations, we only have to talk about what happened to Louis Riel.