Politics & Power Quote by Kate Millett

Politics, Millett suggests, has a muscle-memory problem: it keeps moving, but mostly in circles. Calling politics "repetition" isn’t naïve disappointment; it’s a diagnosis from someone who watched institutions absorb radical demands and then reroute them into procedure, committee language, and polite incrementalism. The line works because it refuses the comforting fiction that "politics" and "progress" are synonyms. For Millett, politics is a machine built to reproduce itself, and the shock is that this reproduction can look like motion.

The subtext is feminist strategy sharpened into philosophy. Millett came out of second-wave feminism, where consciousness-raising and direct action were often dismissed as "not political" precisely because they threatened the routines that politics protects. By pushing "change" outside politics, she flips the usual hierarchy: the living force (change) is primary; the formal system (politics) is secondary, an instrument at best and an obstacle at worst. That’s why her final clause lands like a reprimand: politics is "supposed" to be the means. Supposed, not guaranteed.

Context matters: post-1960s liberation movements collided with a state that could grant reforms while maintaining deeper structures of patriarchy and power. Millett is arguing against reform-as-ending, not reform-as-tool. She’s also warning activists about the seduction of inside-the-system validation. If politics is repetition, then the task is to keep change from being translated into mere policy theater. The quote is less cynicism than an insistence on where the real action starts: outside the loop, before the system can name it and tame it.