A Quote by Henry Giroux

Individual struggles merge into larger social movements. — © Henry Giroux
Individual struggles merge into larger social movements.
I try to think of the social function of fiction as drawing the individual toward larger social and political questions. But I'm also very comfortable in saying that my novel - any novel - doesn't matter as much as larger questions of how we can see justice done.
Today women in many countries are taking part in various types of movements of protest, some of which are serious struggles for economic and social emancipation .
Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.
Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual consciousness in which profound struggles about identity and direction arise - struggles that Mann himself had not only reflected on but felt keenly. Visconti takes up this central focus of the novella, but he couples it with a more social perspective.
Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.
The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.
The only social justice movements worth fighting for are the struggles for justice where you lose, you lose, you lose- until you win.
The two great movements of our century -- towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community -- are summed up in Anarchist-Communism.
I recall coming across a line by the late Charles Tilly when he said, "The conditions for the possibility of social movements have been called into question in the twenty-first century." And I said to myself, my god, a society in history without social movements, for me, is very difficult to live in.
We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.
Although racism does, of course, occur in individual acts, these acts are part of a larger system that we all participate in. The focus on individual incidences prevents the analysis that is necessary in order to challenge this larger system.
You build movements and keep people in a struggle when it feels productive. Anti-capitalists have typically been the people in movements who have declared every gain to be a trick of the capitalist class to buy us off. That line isn't very inspiring, and it shows no sensitivity to how social movements actually succeed.
Problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project.
We deem valuable whatever is likely to meet our needs or wishes (individual values) and whatever is likely to help protect or attain social goals (social values). However, this is not a dichotomy, for some individual values, such as truth, are needed to secure some social values, such as mutual trust, and some social values, such as peace, are required to pursue some individual values, such as good health.
My job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level.
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