Once there was a woman whose name was Name. That was the name her parents gave her. When people asked her, "What is your name?" she would answer, "Name." Often the people did not believe her answer, even though it was true. They were not ready to understand the unusual way her parents had used language when they chose "Name" as her name.

I mention the woman named Name because in this book I will sometimes use language in unusual ways. Please remember that what I say may be true even when the way I use language is surprising.

Our daughter Shelley is the author of the poem above. When she was eleven she was a member of a gang composed of herself and three other professors' kids. When her mother asked what the gang did, Shelley said they sat under a tree on campus and talked about The Point. When her mother and I asked why they talked about The Point, she said they talked about it because the gang could not do anything else until they decided what The Point was.
We lived and worked in Chile for many years, and in the course of my work I got to know a young man named Eduardo, who, when he was 11 years old, worked all day sitting under a tree sewing together strings of tobacco leaves so that they could be hung up to dry. He knew what The Point was: it was survival.

Eduardo was not a backward peasant boy living in a remote part of the world where people grow for themselves the food they eat. He was integrated into the global economy as a supplier of tobacco to a cigarette company operating under a license agreement with a multi­national corporation. Shelley was also integrated into the global economy, as the daughter of a professor at a well-endowed private college, many of whose assets are held as stocks of multinational corporations.

Situated as they are in different positions with respect to the world economic system, which is at once our mother and our master, the source of the food that nourishes us and the source of the competition that disciplines us, is there any way Shelley and Eduardo can under­stand each other?

There is. I call it philosophy.

The name of this book begins with "Letters..." The word "letter" is from the Latin littera and the French lettre. "Letter" originally signified an individually written character, such as the letter a. Then its meaning was expanded to include anything written, and after that its meaning was contracted to signify only something written to a particular person or persons; with its new meaning "letter" gradually replaced the older words "missive" and "epistle." I use the word because I want my philosophy to be thought of as written by a particular person and addressed to particular persons.

The labor organizer Cesar Chavez, for whom I did some work as a lawyer before Caroline and I moved to Chile, was once asked how he organized the farm workers' union. He replied, "First I organized one person, and then another person, and then another person, and then another person, and then another person,..." and so on. That is how I think of my readers: first one person, then another person, then another person....

I hope people will read slowly, taking time to relate what they find here to other things they are reading and to what is happening in their lives. Letters from Quebec is divided into 52 parts, 50 letters and two introductions (one for the first volume and one for the second