“Party members were from all ethnicities and religious sects of Syria, making it likely the most diverse among leftist parties in the country. Women also had a significant and, in later years, growing presence in the ranks of the LCP [Labour Communist Party] though were largely absent from leadership positions (p.191). Alongside the initial involvement of women in the first steps of the party through “Marxist Circles”, or collective political groups, they played an increasingly important role throughout different periods of the party. Female members also suffered from the multiple campaigns of arrests by the security services, especially at the end of the 1980s as their numbers and participation in the party increased. As Shabo writes, the significant numbers of women in the LCP and their activism made the party clearly distinct from other leftist and communist groups, where women’s roles were comparatively less prominent.”
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries— the realists of a larger reality . Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is ...
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