Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Monday, March 28, 2016
Sunday, March 27, 2016
“We
need to compellingly describe a strategic path forward. We need to
explain the range of demands, infrastructure, projects, issues, and
tactics regarding kinship, culture, politics, economics,
international relations, and ecology that will together comprise a
trajectory of change to a better future.” Michael Albert,
Trajectory of Change: Activist Strategies for Social
Transformations, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002, p. 133.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Friday, March 25, 2016
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Sixty
years ago in his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut playfully
(but prophetically) called faux (virtual, familial) ‘connections’
a “granfalloon” — a group of people who choose, or claim to
have, a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is
actually meaningless. The author offered two examples, Daughters of
the American Revolution and the General Electric Company; if Vonnegut
wrote the novel today, the examples could just as easily be Facebook
or Twitter. Indeed, Microsoft’s own marketing aims explicitly at
the “ego” and the ‘Look at me!’ mentality as the largest
driver of online participation (‘free’ immaterial labour): people
contribute to the corporation’s self-created system (for profit) in
order to “increase their social, intellectual, and cultural
capital.” - Jerold J. Kreisman
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
It is a good thing that we should be reminded that a poem is not, like a teacher, a bridge between the truth and the ignorant reader. [. . .] It is a good thing that poets should be reminded that, in poetry, only what you really feel and care about, not what you think you ought to feel and care about, is of any importance. [. . .] -- W.H. Auden, from Foreword to Rosalie Moore’s The Grasshopper’s Man And Other Poems
Monday, March 21, 2016
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Saturday, March 19, 2016
After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely. The workers’ condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalists keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval; it forms, so to speak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian classes, from which the political fight ever renews its strength, and at the same time leads the indefatigable economic sappers of the proletariat at all times, now here and now there, to isolated sharp conflicts, out of which public conflicts on a large scale unexpectedly explode. Rosa Luxembrug, The Mass Strike, IV. The Interaction of the Political and the Economic Struggle
Friday, March 18, 2016
“Works are of value only if they give rise to better ones. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered people have torn down, other-centered people can build up. … human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.” –MLK, speaking against the Vietnam War in 1967
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
To the Left-of-thou cynics and liberal non-participatory nihilists....
To the Left-of-thou cynics and liberal non-participatory nihilists: “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element” (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’ (1918))
Monday, March 14, 2016
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Friday, March 11, 2016
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Monday, March 7, 2016
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)