We live for the struggle, and die for the struggle.

“We live for the struggle, and die for the struggle.” is a declaration in The cadre’s broadcast memorializing its dead members. Its force comes from joining grief to resolve: the speakers acknowledge the loss of comrades, then make continued struggle—and the acceptance of death—sound like the answer to that loss.

Wording and Function

The sentence appears in the comrades’ address to their friends, after the speakers have described the deaths of their associates. It is immediately followed by, “We don’t fear our deaths anymore.” The pairing gives the expression two linked functions: it presents political commitment as enduring beyond the deaths being mourned, and it recasts fearlessness as something the group has acquired through its experience. The words are not a detached maxim; they are part of a message intended to console supporters and affirm the survivors’ resolve.

Broadcast and Circumstances

The declaration reaches its listeners as part of a recorded message aired on the radio. At the safe house, Yvonne’s account of the Los Angeles events is followed by Juan’s political speech; the broadcast then turns to the comrades’ remembrance, where the phrase occurs. The sequence moves from reported particulars to political interpretation and then to personal mourning. Pauline’s section follows, naming and remembering the dead, so the collective pledge is set within an elegy rather than offered as an abstract slogan.

The broadcast also crosses the boundary between the hidden group and a much larger public. Jenny hears the recording while driving; elsewhere, the narrative imagines hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, listening at that moment. The words therefore function both as intimate reassurance among comrades and as a public claim about how the deaths should be understood.

Pauline and the Public Story

The expression belongs to a group whose recent history has already become a media spectacle. After The cadre kidnapped Pauline, won her to its cause, robbed a bank, and was believed to have been killed in a Los Angeles shootout and fire, Sandy spoke at a memorial rally and was cheered. The broadcast’s declaration gives the dead a political voice, while the rally shows how their deaths could also transform public responses to them.

Pauline’s own recorded statement sharpens the connection between the phrase and commitment. On April 3, 1974, she says, “I will stay with these comrades forever, because theirs is the only just battle there is.” News commentary later treats her words as evidence that she has been brainwashed. Jenny challenges that assumption, asking how anyone can know Pauline does not agree with the group. The novel thus places the declaration’s certainty beside an unresolved question: whether a public can distinguish a person’s chosen allegiance from the story it has already decided to tell about her.

Meaning and Limits

The phrase makes collective struggle appear to outlast individual death, but the broadcast does not settle the meaning of that sacrifice. Its defiant language comes from survivors who are also grieving, and its public circulation subjects their account to interpretations they cannot control. Later, Anne reflects that Pauline may remain unknowable even as others in the story are forgotten and the trial is expected to reveal everything. Against that retrospective uncertainty, “We live for the struggle, and die for the struggle” stands as a vivid statement of the group’s belief—not as a final explanation of Pauline or of what the struggle achieved.