Leadership Quote by Frederica Montseny

Power is being relocated in a single, almost percussive sentence: not to a party, not to a parliament, not to a charismatic savior, but to "the people themselves". Montseny’s phrasing is a political act disguised as a moral axiom. The repetition - "the people... and only the people" - is a barricade built out of syntax, shutting the door on paternalism and on the familiar excuse that leaders must drag an unready public toward progress.

The key word is "rhythm". She doesn’t claim the people author the fight in some abstract, romantic way; they set its tempo. That matters because tempo is where control lives: when to escalate, when to pause, when to refuse. It’s an argument against vanguardism and against the state’s monopoly on timing (elections, decrees, emergency powers). In three beats, she reframes political struggle as something closer to collective labor or music than to command-and-control warfare.

Context sharpens the stakes. As a prominent Spanish anarchist and the first female minister in Spain during the Civil War era, Montseny operated inside a contradiction: an anti-statist entering government under existential threat. Read there, the line doubles as a warning to her own side. If revolution becomes an administrative project, it dies; if it becomes a leader’s schedule, it becomes a new hierarchy wearing old slogans.

The subtext is a demand for consent that’s more militant than liberal. Not "listen to the people" but "obey their cadence". It’s democracy not as a checkbox, but as an organizing principle that limits even allies.