Stephanie McMillan
American political cartoonist, editorialist, and activist
Stephanie McMillan (born 1965) is a political cartoonist from South Florida, USA.
Quotes
editCode Green: Environmental Cartoons about the Environmental Emergency (2017)
edit- Because a capitalist economy compels perpetual growth, no reforms or adjustments can make it sustainable.
- Exposing capitalism's effects, such as global warming and pollution, is one crucial part of building a movement to transform society. That was my goal with these cartoons when I drew them during the years 2009-2012.
- Today there are ever-increasing numbers of people doing this, which is very encouraging. But if we are to find viable solutions, we must do more than describe symptoms and warn of dire consequences. We must get to the root of the problem: figure out how to end global capitalism and eliminate the class divisions that enable private wealth accumulation.
- Profiteers will never change through persuasion. Only by all of us stepping up to build a broad mass movement, with workers in the lead, can we become strong enough to challenge, defeat and overthrow the class currently in power.
The Beginning of the American Fall: A Comics Journalist Inside the Occupy Wall Street Movement (2012)
edit- Most of us in the US don't understand populism or many other concepts relevant to political struggle. Even those of us who are active lag far behind much of the world in our grasp of theory-we don't recognize views as coherent lines, and therefore we're incapable of calling them by name, much less foreseeing their far-ranging implications. But we can't keep blithely disdaining the use of "jargon." These words may feel cumbersome and persnickety in our casual, 140-characters-or-less, news-o-tainment culture, but their precision allows us to conceptualize, identify, and decide to accept or reject ideological and political phenomena that could make all the difference to our eventual success or failure.
- We need to build a multi-tendency alliance if we're going to win, that embraces reds, greens, anarchists, anti-oppression activists of all kinds.
- We need to make land public, and collectively controlled by the people. The system wants us to be sick and dysfunctional; we need to take control of our health and not accept toxic food.
- it's only when we can collectively provide for our own needs that we can break our dependency on the capitalist system and create an alternative to it that works.
- We need to take back the means of subsistence that they tore from us-for most of us, many generations ago. We need access to land, and to reconnect with the living world in mutually beneficial ways, re-learn how to live within (and preserve the health of) our bioregions.
- The development from uprising to revolution is never linear or smooth. Ebb must follow surge, yielding ground temporarily in order to consolidate power for the next wave.
- what is certain is that the structural crises and inequalities that gave rise to the global uprisings in the first place will only intensify.
- Life runs much faster than our ability to record and interpret it.
- STUDY HISTORY AND POLITICAL THEORY RELENTLESSLY. We do ourselves no favors by being ignorant of the past experiences and summations of those who came before us.
- New possibilities develop through taking action. We can't conjure strategy out of isolation;
only through collective engagement-trying and failing, learning together from our mistakes.
