"On the Silence of the Oppressed"
— LLR

To speak plainly is a virtue only when the masters’ ears do not twist our truths into threats. Yet what use is clarity when the bourgeois gaze turns our howls into whispers, when the weight of survival chains our tongues? We choke on words unspoken, for the factory bell drowns our voices, and the landlord’s ledger tallies our silence as compliance.

Why raise our fists when the walls of capital are deaf?
Why bleed our souls into pleas that the exploiters dismiss as beggars’ hymns?

We are burdened not by feeling, comrades, but by the theft of our feeling’s worth. To care is not weakness—it is to hunger for bread, for dignity, for a world unshackled. Yet they paint our anguish as madness, our despair as a flaw in our character, never in the rot of their system. They perform humanity in parlors while our children starve in tenements. Their charity is a stage; their pity, a weapon.

We are tired. Not of the struggle, but of the lie that our exhaustion is born of laziness, not exploitation. We are drained, not by the weight of our own hands, but by the boot on our throats, the clock’s relentless gears grinding our bones to dust.

They divide us—pit miner against seamstress, peasant against factory drudge—so we forget we are one bleeding body. They tell us we are nothing, and in their eyes, we become ghosts: labor without face, pain without history. We are as we are treated—invisible, yet the gears cannot turn without our hands.

What is a worker without his chains? What is a comrade who cannot see her reflection in the eyes of her brothers and sisters? They say we are not, so they may pretend the world is not built on our backs. But we are. We are the furnace, the loom, the soil. We are the hands that hold up the sky while the parasites feast.

Do we not know our own strength? They fear we might. Let the silence shatter. Let our divided voices merge into a thunder that cracks their marble palaces. Alone, we are a spark. Together—ah, together—we are the conflagration.

— Workers of the World, Awaken