The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.

Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.

I don't think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person.

It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.

I was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.

I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.