| Marta Harnecker | MR Online

Marta Harnecker (1937-2019)

We mourn the passing of our dear comrade, Marta Harnecker. The statement is from Harnecker’s article, “Latin America and Twenty-First Century Socialism: Inventing to Avoid Mistakes,” from the July-August 2010 issue of Monthly Review:

We need a left that realizes that being radical does not consist of raising the most militant slogan or carrying out the most extreme actions—with which only a few agree, and which scare off the majority—but rather in being capable of creating spaces for the broadest possible sectors to meet and join forces in struggle. The realization that there are many of us in the same struggle is what makes us strong; it is what radicalizes us. We need a left that understands that we must obtain hegemony, that is to say, that we have to convince instead of imposing. We need a left that understands that, more important than what we have done in the past, is what we will do together in the future to win our sovereignty—to build a society that makes possible the full development of all human beings: the socialist society of the twenty-first century.