War & Peace Quote by Domitila Barrios de Chungara

The line refuses the seductive drama of factional purity and replaces it with something harder: solidarity as disciplined practice. Domitila Barrios de Chungara draws a bright boundary between horizontal conflict ("against our companeros") and collective struggle ("with them"), signaling an intent to build power rather than win arguments. In labor movements, internal rivalry can be a slow poison; her phrasing treats it as a luxury the oppressed cannot afford.

The Spanish "companeros" matters. It’s intimate, political, and relational all at once, a word forged in workplaces and street assemblies. By keeping it, even in an English-leaning sentence, she anchors the statement in a shared culture of struggle rather than abstract ideology. The subtext is also gendered: a woman organizer in male-dominated unions insisting that the "principal work" is not merely resisting bosses or dictators, but reorganizing relationships inside the movement so women aren’t relegated to supportive roles.

"Change the system for another one" is blunt, almost anti-rhetorical. She’s not selling reform; she’s naming replacement, and she pairs that ambition with concrete rights: life, work, organization. Not "freedom" in the airy sense, but survival, livelihood, and the right to self-govern - a triad that maps onto the realities of mining communities and state repression in Bolivia, where Barrios de Chungara emerged as a key voice among workers’ families. The real punch is the final clause: "our own organization". It’s a demand to stop being managed - by the state, by employers, and even by well-meaning allies - and to claim the infrastructure of autonomy.