But socialism cannot, as has often been observed, grow up within the interstices of capitalist society. Like Malcolm X said of capitalism and revolution, “It is impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg, even though they both belong to the same family of fowl, so-called fowl. A chicken just doesn't have it within its system to produce a duck egg. It can't do it. It can only produce according to what that particular system was constructed to produce....”

“the exercise book was green” i.m. Lee Harwood

“the exercise book was green” 

                i.m. Lee Harwood


earth a beautiful blue
clouds in the morning red
as it was a single orbit
n’est pas the tents tangl’d
rolling pins in pinked evening
excess not opposed to being
under cover of truck starkness
the trash strata baggage
claim teens temping their first
spree when control plus
zed fails EUREKA
red cedars to return things just-so
rigged tip shawls whetted want
well structure floral lens faltering
obedient sows of so-so danger
we were taught to walk
Adur Arun from sibylline shackles
flood as cold signal brawl

where there’s a till there’s
a weigh as in aureate
matter the yahoo dot co
dot UK worde package
customery brood pressure
contrast standing ceremony
Snowdon’s histrionic café

stepping out from the pyramyth
golden arches secure first sight 
so steal hospital colouring
books false weekend starts
obtuse sharp-shooter jinx prize 
rabbit epidemic shoo first utterance
dharma Damocles ampoule ampelopsis
solar tea dough machine-fun
office marks ex-centric drift tensity
walk a little further
an atomic line regurgitated
tax privilege sworn to
harvest blue-gray of atmospheric haze

white lilies to Lee’s windowsill
answer for Schwitters’s green blood
man utters her best man
tasting iodised salt mango St
Elmo’s fire sunspot activity green
tea-water medium AURORA
green is fluid
particles of the night serpent fire

friends pass phrases seaspent
spraying ochre buildings commanding Church or Western Road sites complaining
exoneration green graphic count
less desires to come into day very
very dark & some
space covered by dense cumulus
home here indefinitely
& green
a degree of infinite infelicity

relief to Klein’s equal blue
stunned by live oak sunning
swimmers generic pus slow
thesis strand
haunches for slow hut
shackles cognate strata but
this is only an excuse

Sonny Sharrock 1988 Knitting Factory

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” Muhammed Ali, 1967

for Ron Silliman

for Ron Silliman

Say you’ve got a right to be here.

Coming up for air

from the hollowed prayer 

Taking to the lazy lizards as I write.

Freedom is access to

two competitive grants

Nature abhors a leash.

Capitalize not every other

but the last for force

Swig-fizz of shit beer

brightened by insect chants

by my bite-swollen ear

Drab cardinal whistles

to mockingbird it thinks

is a mockingbird

Cricket walks

up the porch post

to get to the tree

The cat in the Kabyle.

The lighter side of… Centcom.

The Nono simply in your head

...

Wanda Jackson Funnel Of Love

Doesn't get much better than this: That
lil' snarl on the vocal slays me every time.

Zines: The Power of DIY Print (short documentary)

Elaine Brown: New Age Racism

Dorothy Roberts: “Excessive state inference in Black family life damages Black people's sense of personal and community identity. Family and community disintegration weakens Blacks' collective ability to overcome institutionalized discrimination and work toward greater political and economic strength. Family integrity is crucial to group welfare because of the role parents and other relatives play in transmitting survival skills, values, and self-esteem to the next generation. Families are a principal form of 'oppositional enclaves' that are essential to democracy, to use Jane Mansbridge's term. Placing large numbers of children in state custody – even if some are ultimately transferred to adoptive homes – interferes with the group's ability to form healthy connections among its members and to participate fully in the democratic process. The system's racial disparity also reinforces the quintessential racist stereotype: that Black people are incapable of governing themselves and need state supervision.” Dorothy Roberts, 'Feminism, Race, and Adoption Policy,' in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006, p. 46-7.

SoapBox

SoapBox

ECLIPSE - PLANE DEBRIS (RIP Stephen)

ECLIPSE - PLANE DEBRIS

Cincinnati Enquirer Interview with Eugene Debs

https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1895/0626-debs-socialismonlyremedy.pdf

Offizielles Protokoll der 5. National-Konventin der Soz. Arbeiter-Partei von Nord-Amerika, abgehalten am 5., 6., 7. und 8. Oktober 1885 in Cincinnati, Ohio : Socialist Labor Party. National Convention : Free Download

Official Records of the 5th National Konventin of Soz. Workers Party of North America, held on 5, 6, 7 and 8 October 1885 in Cincinnati, Ohio: Socialist Labor Party. National Convention: Free Download

Interview With Eldridge Cleaver | The Two Nations Of Black America | FRONTLINE | PBS

Interview With Eldridge Cleaver | The Two Nations Of Black America | FRONTLINE | PBS



So I was pulling the trigger to blow your head off, and something told me not to do it." I said, "praise the Lord." He said, "praise the Lord." He told me, "I am no longer a police officer." He said, "I have my own private security firm now." He said, "the reason that they have not been rushing you to court is because of my testimony and the testimony of 13 other police officers who were that night who do not agree with what the police did in the way they killed Bobby Hutton." He said, "they murdered Bobby. They murdered my prisoner." That's what he said. Then he went on to describe -- he said, "the police have the responsibility of enforcing the law, the guardians of the law. But what they did that night was worse than what you did." He said, "if you are going to court, I am going to testify against you because what you did was wrong. But I'm also going to testify against them because what they did was worse. There is no statute of limitation on murder. What they did was first degree murder." 

“Our societies have proved to be really demonic since they happen to combine those two games -- the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game -- in what we call modern states.” -- Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and Reason,’ in L.D. Kritzman (ed.), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, NY: Routledge, 1988, pp. 57-85, p. 71.

Angela Davis – 'Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism'

www.sfwar.org/pdf/SACOC/WOC_FSU_84.pdf

"When Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly and disabled African-American grandmother was killed by a shotgun blast to the chest fired by police officers who had come to assist in her eviction from public housing (because she was less than ninety dollars behind in her rent), Black communities in New York City rose up in outrage. When Tyisha Miller was shot twenty-five times by police officers who, responding to a distress call, found her in the midst of an epileptic seizure in her car, yet claimed she pulled a gun – which was never found – Black communities in Riverside, California, too to the streets..."

Cincinnati: The Reds come home to roost....

Shout out to my old comrade, Geoff Bliss. here's his lil' piece on our community space Soapbox Books & Zines's new neighbourhood SoapBox Books & Zines: http://www.globalsiteplans.com/…/forgotten-history-the-cin…/ To add to Geoff's take: "In spite of these successes, anti-Communism, politics, loss of financing, and internal conflicts led to its demise. Cincinnati's mayor accused the Mohawk-Brighton organization of manifesting an "alien" philosophy in its work, implicating it as being just short of Bolshevism, the bogeyman of U.S. political life in these "Red Scare" years. In THE ORGANIC CITY, Mooney-Melvin expands on the controversy, and the aspects of the Mohawk-Brighton organization considered most objectionable. Although the membership of social unit founder, Wilbur Phillips, in the Socialist Party at an earlier stage in his life, was cited as evidence of complicity, this appeared to be minor. More important was the attempt to organize residents at the local level, something seen as too similar as the "soviets" of the Bolshevik experiment.". In the spring of 1919 Cincinnati's mayor, John Galvin, accused the MBSUO of expressing an alien political philosophy and declared that it was "a serious menace to our municipal government and but one step removed from Bolshevism." ) Social Unit Is Serious Menace to City Government, Says Mayor Galvin," Cincinnati Enquirer, March 11, 1919, p. 7. See also “Who Makes Bolshevism in Cincinnati” New Republic, April 19, 1919, 367. 

“So far from imposing an alienating straight-jacket upon the speaking subject, language opens up an infinite area of untrammeled mobility. But within this area, there must still be someone who moves, and we cannot think the being of language without thinking the being of the speaking subject.” Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Sayable and the Unsayable: Homage to Maurice Merleau-Ponty,’ Crossroads in the Labyrinth, tr. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 133.

Moral Appeals Aren't Enough | Solidarity

Moral Appeals Aren't Enough | Solidarity

“There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant — life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it's not nice to go around constantly offending people.” — Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

One night Jim Tate was driving me through the Pelham Woods and we hit a deer. Being the oversensitive young writer I was, I immediately started fretting, my breath curtailed, and could feel a deep, dark panic attack coming over me. Reassuring me that he saw the deer walk off the injury and then bound into the bushes, Jim proceeded to distract me with every anecdote and story he could tell about all things deer, so that by the time we arrived at our destination, on an imperceptibly far longer route, my mind had turned to a state of acceptance, a little wiser, refusing an embarrassed smile.