Ken Wentworth

'After all, if freedom had always had to rely on governments to encourage her growth she would probably still be in her infancy...

The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, as far as I know, with assuring the triumph of freedom and justice...

Freedom is the concern of the oppressed, and her natural protectors have always come from among the oppressed...

And if freedom is regressing today throughout such a large part of the world, this is probably because the devices for enslavement have never been so cynically chosen or so effective, but also because her real defenders through fatigue, through despair, or through a false idea of strategy and efficiency, have turned away from her. Yes, the great event of the twentieth century was the forsaking of freedom...

Since that moment a certain hope has disappeared from the world and solitude has begun for each and every free man...

And because bourgeois society talks of freedom without practicing it, must the world of workers also give up practicing it and boast merely of not talking about it?

...In conclusion, the characteristic of the world we live in is just that cynical dialectic which sets up injustice against enslavement while strengthening one by the other...

How then can this infernal circle be broken? Obviously, it can be done by reviving at once, in ourselves and in others, the value of freedom - and by never again agreeing to its being sacrificed, even temporarily, or separated from our demand for justice...

The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates... humiliates the intelligence, and vice a versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation '

Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. (Vintage Books, 1974.) Excerpt from speech given at the Labor Exchange of Saint-Etienne on 10 May 1953.