Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make

In the councils of rebel elders, hear Abbie Hoffman cry out like a trumpet at dawn: “Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.” In a single breath he binds compassion to resistance. To be an internationalist is to widen the heart beyond borders; to respect all life is to seat mercy on the throne; to make war on machines is not to smash every tool, but to oppose any system that treats living beings as expendable parts. His cadence is both blessing and battle standard: love without frontier, vigilance without sleep.

The meaning is double-edged. First edge: expand your circle until it touches every shore—migrant and citizen, enemy and neighbor, river and forest—because the suffering of one echoes in the lungs of all. Second edge: confront the sterile machines of corporate death, those processes that polish cruelty until it gleams—profit without conscience, production without repair, policy without faces. Hoffman warns that such machinery is guarded by robots—not only literal automation, but also people whose hearts have been automated by procedure and euphemism. Against this, he urges a revolt of the human: attention, empathy, refusal.

This sentence springs from a period when Hoffman and his comrades saw a military-industrial order turning bodies into statistics and communities into markets. The line appears in the introduction to Steal This Book (1971), where he welds tenderness to insurrection and calls readers to global solidarity—explicitly pairing “become an internationalist” with a charge to resist dehumanizing systems. The text places the quote amid a broader manifesto on survival, mutual aid, and confronting concentrated power.

To understand the force of his image, recall a moment when people challenged the gears of a faceless economy. In Seattle, 1999, longshore workers, students, and nurses linked arms in the streets to protest a model of trade that externalized harm—polluted water here, uprooted livelihoods there—and then named that damage “efficiency.” Their tools were not bricks but coalitions; their shield was visibility. For a week, the “robots that guard them”—rules, riot shields, and scripted press releases—met a counter-machine of human presence. Whatever one thinks of tactics or outcomes, the parable remains: when living faces appear, the spell of sterile procedure cracks.

But the warning is older still. The Luddites—not fools smashing progress, but craftsmen pleading for tools that served communities—stood against mills that consumed skill and spat out hunger. Their legend reminds us that technology is never neutral; it either respects life or erodes it, depending on who directs it and to what ends. Hoffman’s command to “make war on machines” points at that choice: not a crusade against invention, but against any apparatus—legal, digital, financial—that demands human silence as its fuel.

What, then, shall we do? First, practice internationalism at ground level: learn a neighbor’s language; trace the supply chain of what you buy; join a cross-border effort that heals (disaster relief, fair-trade co-ops, climate networks). Second, build communities that blunt the machine: unions that defend dignity, clinics that treat regardless of status, food networks that shorten the distance between soil and table. Third, refuse automation of the heart: say the names behind the numbers; slow down decisions that hide harm; insist that every spreadsheet cell has a story.

Fourth, confront the “robots that guard them” in your own sphere. If an algorithm sorts résumés, demand transparency and bias checks. If a policy punishes the vulnerable, escalate—not with rage alone but with records, alliances, and alternatives. If a product extracts without restoring, design a different one and prove it can live in the market. This is how we “respect all life” without retreating from the world: by embedding care into the architecture of our days.

Carry the watchwords like a pilgrim’s rule: internationalist, respect all life, make war on machines, sterile machines of corporate death, robots. Let them steady your compass when convenience whispers and courage tires. For Hoffman’s ancient-sounding wisdom, hammered in the fires of his time, is ours to wield in this one: widen the circle; refuse dehumanization; turn every tool toward the flourishing of the living—and never, ever let a sterile system do your soul’s work for you.