James H. Cone on the Cross and the Lynching Tree

Bruce Springsteen: American Skin (41 Shots)

This Machine Kills Fascists

Was Woody Guthrie an anarchist? Beats me. Would he have approved the following statement of Anarchist goals? Again, it beats me, but I think he would have found much in this statement that resonated with his own brand of Left-wing populism:

The anarchist conception of power is in opposition to the Marxist conception of the seizure and adaptation of coercive, vertical, centralised [sic], bourgeois power. Instead, anarchists argue for, and in their innumerable revolts and their four main revolutions have practiced, a free, horizontal, federalist, proletarian counter-power that would equitably distribute decision-making powers and responsibilities across liberated communities. In particular, anarchist theorists have grappled with how to construct a real, living libertarian communist praxis, thereby encountering the key question facing all revolutionaries: how does the militant minority transmit the ideas of a free society to the oppressed classes, in such a way that the oppressed makes those ideas their own, moving beyond the origins of those ideas into the realm of libertarian autogestion.

--Michael Schmidt, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism, AK Press (2013),
6.

Moreover, I think Woody might answer the "key question facing all revolutionaries" with one word: music.

Hope For An American Spring

We, as anarchists, know that people, even the bourgeoisie, are not inherently bad; we all merely conform to our class interests. Given the right conditions, conditions of true equality and freedom, a powerful spirit of mutual aid and co-operation has been demonstrated to come to the fore in the popular masses...

How we act is related to the structure of society. When oppression and exploitation are forcibly removed by directly-democratic, horizontally-federated organizations operating under the guidance of the popular will, then the "goodness" that is in most of us comes through and flourishes as it did when the workers held the reigns in Argentina, Macedonia, Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Manchuria, China, Iran, Cuba, France, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Algeria, and elsewhere.

--Michael Schmidt, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism, AK Press (2013), 128.

Is This A Rhetorical Question?

Can American democracy survive its betrayal by the government? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Faulknerian Criticism

In his late novel Intruders in the Dust, William Faulkner characterized the United States as "a mass of people who no longer have anything in common save a frantic greed for money and a basic fear of a failure of national character which they hide from one another behind a loud lip-service to a flag."

On July 4th, 2013, declare your independence from all of that.

Faulkner on Mob Rule vs. Man

"...there is a simple numerical point at which a mob cancels and abolishes itself, maybe because it has finally got too big for darkness, the cave it was spawned in is no longer big enough to conceal it from light and so at last whether it will or no it has to look at itself...Or maybe it's because man having passed into mob passes then into mass which abolishes mob by absorption, metabolism, then having got too large even for mass becomes man again conceptible of pity and justice and conscience even if only in the recollection of his long painful aspiration toward them, toward that something anyway of one serene universal light."

"So man is always right," he said.

"No," his uncle said. "He tries to be if they who use him for their own power and aggrandisement let him alone. Pity and justice and conscience too--that belief in more than the divinity of individual man (which we in America have debased into a national religion of the entrails in which man owes no duty to his soul because he has been absolved of soul to owe duty to and instead is static heir at birth to an inevictible quit-claim on a wife a car a radio and an old-age pension) but in the divinity of his continuity as Man..."

[William Faulkner, Intruder In The Dust, LOA edition, 436].