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Cindy Milstein
92 quotes
“You only feel pain and grief over things you love and care about.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview (2017)
“I've never been at home in this world, though. That's why I fight so fiercely for other possible ones. That's why, as both an anarchist and Jew, I've long dreamed of do-it-ourselves, egalitarian forms of social organization ones in which we're all reciprocally and abundantly cared for, not to mention messy-beautifully whole.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from the Prologue to There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists (2020)
“We're only human," the saying goes, but our humanity is profoundly damaged by the alienated world of control that we inhabit. Anarchism contends that people would be much more humane under nonhierarchical social relations and social arrangements.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism serves unflinchingly as a philosophy of freedom, as the nagging conscience that people and their communities can always be better.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many different though often complementary ways of looking at anarchism, but in a nutshell, it can be defined as the striving toward a "free society of free individuals.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For centuries, people grew up believing, in essence, that reason was only to be gleaned from the word of a monarch and/or god. Enlightenment philosophy gave voice to the ideas of on-the-ground social struggles and, in percolating through society, gradually shattered such self-abnegation with the increasingly hegemonic understanding that everyone has the ability to think for themselves.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like capitalism, the state will not "negotiate" with any other sociopolitical system. It attempts to take up more and more governance space. It is neither neutral nor can it be "checked and balanced." The state has its own logic of command and control, of monopolizing political power. Anarchists held that the state cannot be used to dismantle capitalism, nor as a transitional strategy toward a noncapitalist, nonstatist society.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism always "demands the impossible" even as it tries to also "realize the impossible." Its idealism is thoroughly pragmatic. Hierarchical forms of social organization can never fulfill most peoples' needs or desires, but time and again, nonhierarchical forms have demonstrated their capacity to come closer to that aim. It makes eminent and ethical sense to experiment with utopian notions. No other political philosophy does this as consistently and generously, as doggedly, and with as much overall honesty about the many dead-ends in the journey itself.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the outset, anarchism grounded itself in a set of shared values. These revolved around interconnected notions such as liberty and freedom, solidarity and internationalism, voluntary association and federation, education, spontaneity and harmony, and mutual aid. Anarchist principles affirmed humanity's potential to meet everyone's needs and desires, via forms of nonhierarchical cooperative and collective arrangements.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism is not immune from the increasing fragmentation and immediacy, among other conditions, that characterize much of contemporary capitalist society. It is just as damaged by the phenomena it decries. Even as anarchists advocate a community of communities, they are, like most people today, alienated from any sense of place and hence each other. Nonetheless, there remains a profound sense of recognition between anarchists, based on a shared set of distinct values, which in turn structure their lives and projects.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First and foremost, anarchism is a revolutionary political philosophy. That is, anarchism is thoroughly radical in the true sense of the word: to get at the root or origin of phenomena, and from there to make dramatic changes in the existing conditions. Anarchism aspires to fundamentally transform society, toward expansive notions of individual and social freedom.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Despite the difficulties, anarchists never advocate a purely reformist attitude. They try their best never to participate in reform as an end in itself, or to bring about improvements that also make the present social order look attractive. Their efforts to move from "here" to "there" intentionally highlight how current social arrangements cannot, by their own raison d'être, meet everyone's needs and desires.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism is not satisfied with remaining on the surface, merely tinkering to make a damaged world a little less damaging. It is a thoroughgoing critique aimed at a thoroughgoing reimagining and restructuring of society. It views this as essential if everyone is to be free, and if humanity is to harmonize itself with the nonhuman world.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism doesn't concentrate on just the economic, political, cultural, psychological, or other spheres. Nor does it separate any single issue from its relation to other issues, even if one personally places emphasis on a particular area. It concerns itself with everything that makes people human, including the nonhuman world. The work of anarchism takes place everywhere, every day, from within the body politic to the body itself.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The important thing about moving toward a better world is how people go about doing it. Anarchist practices share distinct elements, even if they're implemented in different ways: the lives and communities that they attempt to establish are premised on a shared ethical compass. This is key, given that most social forces presently deny and try to destroy such alternatives. Reconstructive efforts to restructure everyday life imply that people can work to destroy commodified and coercive relations. They also sustain people for the hard work of doing just that.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism serves as a touchstone not simply for anarchists but especially for those who encounter anarchism's challenge: "What's the right thing to do?" The classical anarchists called this simply "the Idea." Anarchism stands as a beacon through its history and practices, and perhaps most especially through its ideals.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Constantly working to bring both liberation and freedom to the table, within moments of resistance and reconstruction, is part of that same juggling act of approximating an increasingly differentiated yet more harmonious world.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism believes in everyone's ability to take part in thinking through and acting on, in compassionate ways, the world they inhabit. It maintains that everyone deserves to shape and share in society.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The equality of unequals isn't simply about materials needs. It is a sensibility to guide how humans can justly apply equal worth to the rich nonequivalency of differentiation.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone who has ever been involved in a voluntary collective project knows that people can manage to get things done in ways that account for differences in talents, proclivities, and the common good. They can do this without force, equivalency, unhappiness, or the state. To the contrary, such experiments viscerally point to a sense of personal and social satisfaction that far outstrips systems of "from each according to what they are forced to do, to each according to their financial means, and otherwise people go without.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pleasure and love are what motivate people to aspire toward a better world. These and other feelings aren't luxuries separate from people's material needs. They are part and parcel of the need for a full, individuated, and genuinely social life.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the essence of a good society: that people are able to feel goodness in themselves and each other as much as possible; that even when things are difficult or life is painful, people have the support of others; that the ways we get things done are also the ways we carve out spaces to fully see and appreciate each other. And have fun.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchists vigilantly resist the world that is, while simultaneously engaging in those hopeful behaviors that point toward new social relations. They practice the beauty that human beings are striving to achieve in the world that could be. Anarchist activities emphasize the aesthetic and the joyful.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Savoring play is just as much part of a revolutionary impulse within anarchism as is struggle—and both are essential to qualitative freedom.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchists attempt to find harmony in dissonance, like instruments in an orchestra.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether it's contradictions between the local and the global, independence and interdependence, autonomy or direct democracy, anarchists honestly and transparently struggle to find unities that don't deny differences. This ethical commitment is essential to anarchist experiments, since it intimately relates to anarchism's definition. Much of what anarchists do in practice involves crafting relationships, processes, and agreements, personally and within self-organized institutions, that are precisely about finding the balance of a unity in diversity.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism is not just an ideal; it is not merely a thought experiment. Nor is it a blueprint or rigid plan. Its reconstructive stance dreams up ways to embody its ethics, and then tries to implement them.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is in the process of constructing new worlds that transformation happens, in how people set about making their way toward something appreciably better.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Revolution entails evolution.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's when people increasingly take charge, instituting and participating in nonhierarchical organization, that they begin to have the power to reshape society, rather than simply the "power" to react against those forces that ultimately have power over them.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism borrows from the seemingly impossible possibilities of the past and present. It then gifts such potentialities to everyone, supplying hope by pointing toward an increasingly liberatory future.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism's laboratory is the whole of life.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchism appears to be the only form of that speaks to the times and people's dreams.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is the spirit of anarchism, the ghost that haunts humanity: that our lives and communities really can be appreciably better. And better, and then better still.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The project of the present anticapitalist movement, and anarchism's strong suit in general, is to provide a guiding light, even if we aren't the ones to finally bask in it.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Still, the grand experiments of the past aimed at a free and self-governing society have not been extinguished—they have reemerged in the anarchistic strains charted here and, most promisingly, the current contest against capitalism fought along antiauthoritarian lines. Not a bad beginning to the twenty-first century.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy finds its radical edge in the great revolutions of the past.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Certainly, liberation is a basic necessity: people need to be free from harm, hunger, and hatred. But liberation falls far short of freedom. If we are ever to fulfill both our needs and desires, if we are ever to take control of our lives, each and every one of us needs the "freedom to" self-develop—individually, socially, and politically.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The revolutionary question becomes: Where do decisions that affect society as a whole get made? For this is where power resides. It is time that we rediscover the "lost treasure" that arises spontaneously during all revolutions—the council, in all its imaginative varieties—as the basis for constituting places of power for everyone. For only when we all have equal and ongoing access to participate in the space where public policy is made—the political sphere—will freedom have a fighting chance to gain a footing.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Power needs to be forever linked to freedom; freedom needs to be the limit placed on power.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom is never a done deal, nor is it a fixed notion.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a practice, direct democracy will have to be learned. As a principle, it will have to undergird all decision making. As an institution, it will have to be fought for. It will not appear magically overnight.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must infuse all our political activities with politics. It is time to call for a second "American Revolution," but this time, one that breaks the bonds of nation-states, one that knows no borders or masters, and one that draws the potentiality of libertarian self-governance to its limits, fully enfranchising all with the power to act democratically. This begins with reclaiming the word democracy itself—not as a better version of representation but as a radical process to directly remake our world.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have become so confined, so thoroughly damaged, by capitalism as well as state control that crumbs appear to make a nourishing meal.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Temporarily closing off the streets during direct actions does provide momentary spaces in which to practice democratic process, and even offers a sense of empowerment, but such events leave power for power's sake, like the very pavement beneath our feet, unchanged. Only when the serial protest mode is escalated into a struggle for popular or horizontal power can we create cracks in the figurative concrete, thereby opening up ways to challenge capitalism, nation-states, and other systems of domination.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We're not putting off the good society until some distant future but attempting to carve out room for it in the here and now, however tentative and contorted under the given social order. In turn, this consistency of means and ends implies an ethical approach to politics. How we act now is how we want others to begin to act, too. We try to model a notion of goodness even as we fight for it.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The beauty of the direct action movement, it could be said, is that it strives to take its own ideals to heart.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What gets forgotten in relation to direct action mobilizations is the promise implicit in their own structure: that power not only needs to be contested; it must also be constituted anew in liberatory and egalitarian forms. This entails taking directly democratic processes seriously—not simply as a tactic to organize protests but as the very way we organize society, specifically the political realm.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Accountable, democratic structures of our own making, in short, provide the foundation for trust, since the power to decide is both transparent and ever-amenable to scrutiny.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any vision of a free society, if it is to be truly democratic, must of course be worked out by all of us—first in movements, and later, in our communities and federations.”
Cindy Milstein (born 2000) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source