quaedam - Tumblr blog

[quaedam]

Anyone headed to a Womens March (if only to stand in a corner and burn a flag while crowds of liberals chant “USA”), consider printing these little critters and handing em out. :)

[quaedam]

hello: this is what I’m up to right now

1. painting/drawing/printmaking/sculpting and working on a portfolio for applying to MFA programs this year

2. attempting to organize a transit riders union with a bunch of assorted local commies and union folks and transit riders and also to prevent fares being raised on the trains and buses (which is... kinda working? I mean we’ve actually gotten them to push back their decision on raising fares from August last year to March this year just by getting folks who use the train and bus to show up to annoy the board at every one of their monthly meetings during public comments (among other things)? Turning this into a transit riders union that lasts past the campaign against this specific fare hike will be trickier, but here’s hoping. Anyhow, talent is a fake idea and just doing something a lot is how to become good at a thing, or at least functional at a thing. I mean, if I can learn to interact with other people / routinely draw attention to myself in public in potentially embarrassing but necessary ways, what can human beings not learn to do just by doing it over and over again :).)

3. finally finishing that commission list from before I started taking classes again two years ago, damn

P.S.: join a socialist group in your area. anything that’s not, like, the SEP, the RCP, the Sparts or the Plats (and speaking of the Plats, please enjoy this obscure humorous video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZgCmQBEv9E )

[quaedam]

"Lenin never weighed a man at a glance, forming some average estimate of him. His eye was like a microscope; it would magnify many times the trait that came within its field of vision at a particular moment. He would often fall in love with people, in the full sense of the word. And on such occasions I would tease him: “I know, I know, you are having a new romance.” Lenin realized this characteristic of his, and would laugh by way of reply, a little embarrassed but a little angry, too.

Trotsky, “My Life” (https://www.marxists.org/arc.../trotsky/1930/mylife/ch29.htm)

same tbh

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everyone stop what you’re doing, Leonard Cohen once recorded Solidarity Forever and it’s gorgeous

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@podracerbarrelroll 

I got through like 2 episodes of that. Is it worth sticking around?

I never really got into the first season, but at least so far season 2 seems to be an independent story set in the same world, and a more interesting/less obvious premise. Also a parody gallery guide from an art exhibit is a much less annoying thing to listen to than a parody of a meditation/breathing exercise tape, and the performer in season 2 is much better.

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I’m immediately more into the second season of Within the Wires than the first

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one of my favorite local comrades created a poster for a noDAPL thing today which was a takeoff on this Trotsky poster but with a native fighter on horseback killing the DAPL black snake 

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HOLY SHIT

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tired: signing off emails “in solidarity”

wired (apparently): signing off emails “red regards”

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there are no good translations into English for all the best antifascist, communist, anarchist songs and I almost think the only solution is to learn the songs in the orignal languages

(also I’m seriously considering setting up a socialist choir or at least a sing along night or something because I’ve witnessed too many failed attempts to sing the internationale lately and we just have to sit people down and learn that fucking thing)

(preferably the original version with “we’ll shoot the generals on our own side” in but whatever)

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\o/

(lots of Workers World Party signs there; the WWP does good work <3)

Protesters in Durham bring down Confederate statue

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congratulate me on my recent wedding: https://solidarity-us.org/

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“For the Trinidadian revolutionary C.L.R. James, there existed an undeniable gap between the Jacobin leadership of the French Revolution and the grassroots fury of the sansculottes. The former, like Robespierre, were authoritarians; the latter, radical democrats. But they coincided momentarily and strategically toward the goal of defeating a brutal enemy on the field of battle: “Never until 1917 were masses ever to have such powerful influence — for it was no more than influence — upon any government.”

No one would claim that the Venezuelan masses are in power today, but the past twenty years have seen them come closer than ever before. Their enemies and ours are in the streets, burning and looting in the name of their own class superiority, and we know exactly what they will do if they are successful. The only path forward is to deepen and radicalize the Bolivarian process through the expansion of the radically democratic socialism embodied in Venezuela’s grassroots communes, which help to overcome the economic contradictions of the petro-state while expanding participatory political consciousness.

The only way out of the Venezuelan crisis today lies decisively to the Left: not in the neither-nor of “que se vayan todos” (“out with them all”), but in the construction of a real socialist alternative that will emerge alongside the Maduro government if possible, but without it if necessary.”

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my entire life these days is spent wanting to make “I hope senpai notices me” jokes to people whom I’m not sure would understand them

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@woodenrosebouquet

i had dreams of being a nun or better, a hermit in the woods as a kid. also im scared of getting involved with the socialist orgs in my city. one because ex roommate drama, the other because... no good reason lol

aw hell yeah I wanted to live in the woods too! I read Stalking the Wild Asparagus in middle school and I was always trying to cook weeds I found in the yard. 

Maybe see what the org that hasn’t got any strikes against it does around town? I kinda recommend joining whatever socialist group has the most effective and awesome people associated with it, in your area. Whoever you see out and about and doing the sort of work you think needs doing. (Also don’t under any circumstances join the Spartacists, the RCP, or the SEP haha)

(this isn’t exactly related to anything but I just found out today that there are two completely different orgs both called FRSO (Freedom Road Socialist Organization) -- they split back in the 80s (I think) and both refused to give up the name, and the person who told me about this calls them FRSO Jedi and FRSO Sith)

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Tired: getting married, moving apart, getting divorced and marrying someone else

Wired: joining a democratic centralist socialist organization as a bb communist, eventually learning more about marxist politics and discovering you’ve got irreconcilable differences with some of the national org’s politics, joining a multi-tendency socialist org instead

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The poetic ideal is always an untrue ideal, for the true ideal is always the actual. So when the spirit is not allowed to rise into the eternal world of spirit, it remains in transit and delights in the pictures reflected in the clouds and weeps over their transitoriness. Therefore, a poet-existence as such is an unhappy existence; it is higher than the finite and yet is not the infinite. The poet sees the ideals, but he must run away from the world in order to delight in them. He cannot carry these idols within him in the midst of life’s confusion, cannot calmly go his way unmoved by the caricature that appears around him, to say nothing of his having the strength to put on the ideals. For this reason the poet’s life is often the object of a shabby pity on the part of people who think they have their own lives safe and sound because they have remained in the finite. … But if you do not want to be a poet, then there is no other way for you than the one I have pointed out to you: Despair! Choose despair, then, because despair itself is a choice, because one can doubt without choosing it, but one cannot despair without choosing it. And in despairing a person chooses again, and what then does he choose? He chooses himself, not in his immediacy, not as this accidental individual, but he chooses himself in his eternal validity.

Either/Or ( https://books.google.com/books?id=WfvXAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA77#v=onepage&q&f=false )