#HOPE IS THE BASIS FOR MY REVOLUTION AND LOVE FOR MY REVOLT | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stephenjaymorrisblog · 3 years

Text

I Hope the Communists Take Over the USA

7/11/21

Stephen Jay Morris

©Scientific Morality

Living in the USA during the 1950’s and early 60’s was a stone cold drug. People had bomb shelters in their backyards. Public school students were required to perform daily exercises known as “Drop Drills.” Out of nowhere, during a lesson, the teacher would command with one word, “Drop!” There would be a moment of hesitation and, then, like trained monkeys, we would drop to the floor, scoot as best we could underneath our desks, and cover our heads with both hands and arms. This action was called, “duck and cover.” On every second Friday of the month, old World War II sirens would sound out across Los Angeles. I remember how, for a second, I thought, “This is it! Soviet planes are going to drop bombs on us!” If my mom said something off center or even slightly liberal, my dad would chide her, “Marilyn! Somebody might hear you! Watch what you say!” It was all centered around the fear of Communism. Back then, we were force fed patriotism. You were never allowed to say anything critical or negative about America. The atmosphere was stifling and paranoiac.

I was 9 years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I have no memory of it. Anti-Communism was a requirement for Americans then. President John F. Kennedy proclaimed Anti-Communism like any Republican did, so the centrists and liberals did the same. Now, the moronic conservatives are using this Neo-McCarthyism tactic of accusing liberals of being Communists. Kennedy’s brand of Anti-Communism was finessed and civil, but the Neanderthal MAGA type of Anti-Communism consists of primal drooling-on-the-floor. And, let’s not forget, chest-beating! I notice, also, that Islamo-phobia is now less of a priority than Anti-Communism. So, because of corporate media, we are subjected to Right wing corophila on a daily basis, displayed on flat screens across America.

The Religious Right tells us, everyday, about the evils of Communism. Why? Because Communists are Atheists—which goes to show that everybody has some good in them. It’s not that Right wing Christians are opposed to Authoritarianism—oh, they love that type of shit! They hate Communism because its followers don’t believe in God. Period! Even though the content of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” could have gotten him on McCarthy’s Blacklist, the Religious Right oppose Islam because they are competitor representatives of God. You know: “My God is an awesome God. Allah is a false God!” Don’t those stupid fucks know that “God” and “Allah” mean the same thing? Jesus! See what I mean? What they want is a Christian Theocracy run by a corporate oligarchy: a Fascist Christian State! Somebody should tell them that America is a Republic, not a Theocracy. They will declare how evil an Islamic Theocracy is and then proclaim how wonderful a White Christian government would be. They would burn Britney Spears on a stake for allegedly practicing witchcraft. (Well...at least we wouldn’t have to hear about her conservatorship case in court.) A Christian Theocratic government would control your behavior and a morality squad would break into your room and shoot you for masturbating. Would a Communist government do that? Hell, no! They believe in “Free Love.”

Do I really want a Communist government? Not really. But if I was faced with an ultimatum between a Christian police state and a Stalinist state, I would choose a Communist state any day. Under Communism, there would be no sports analysts disrupting a basketball game. A Communist government would abolish Christmas, and we would no longer be obligated to buy family members and friends gifts. No more Christmas songs! Yes!!! We would be wearing uniforms, so we would save a lot of money on clothes. If anyone suffered a heart attack under a Christian state, all they would get is a prayer circle surrounding them as they lie dying on the floor. Under Communism, they’d be rushed to a hospital where their life would be saved. And, all for free! There would be no more lectures about “self reliance;” the impetus would be more about team work.

I am an Anti-Authoritarian leftist. That means, I don’t have to declare that I am Anti-Communist or even Anti-Fascist. I oppose allauthority! No social construct can be under God’s rule because God may not exist; and, if he did, I would rebel against him/her, or it. How do you like thempronouns! You want to read communist propaganda? Read the gospel of Jesus Christ! Let’s cancel stupidity! Bye!

Addendum: 7/13/21 “Cuban Protests” For decades, there haven’t been civil protests in Cuba. When the Stalinist dictator, Fidel Castro, was in power, he controlled Cuba with an iron fist. Any complaints about the Revolution were suppressed to the world media by him. Che Guevara was not a big supporter of Castro, but in revolutionary solidarity, his disagreements with the dictator were kept secret. After Castro kicked the bucket, his brother, Raúl Castro, took over. Eventually, he retired.

Cuba wasn’t as totalitarian as, say, North Korea. However, there weren’t any democratic elections. Matter of fact, American Conservatives see Castro’s election as a model to establish, in the USA, what he had. Cuban Gays were treated badly and the Cuban government spied on its citizens. A little esoteric note: It was the only time American Trotskyites tepidly supported a Stalinist regime.

When President Barack Obama reopened this country’s relationship with Cuba, the American Right protested. Cuban exiles protested his restart of diplomatic relations. Then, along came Trump, who reinstated the prior embargo. He wanted to reward the Cuban anti-Communists by closing the doors of peace. What a guy.

Compared to what happened in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, the recent protests in Cuba were as peaceful as a 1969 Anti-war protest in America: a lot of shouting and chanting and picket signs. They all marched in a straight line. This was no mandate against communism; this was a grievance about government policies. The protesters all wore masks to comply with health recommendations. A lot of Black Cubans marched, also. There was no violence. Hell, you can’t even call this a pro-Democracy revolt, such as is occurring in Hong Kong. The Right wing Cubans in Miami, honking their horns in celebration, are wasting their car batteries! There is no counter-Revolution in Cuba, contrary to mainstream reporting.

Let’s hope the CIA is not involved in this so-called Cuban uprising. Read the history of the 1961 “Bay of Pigs,” during the JFK Administration. Note that this event in Cuba quickly followed the assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise. More espionage shit? Maybe. But, then, I’d be labeled a conspiracy nut.

#american history #MAGA2021 #poets of tumblr #Stephenjaymorris #anarchocommunism #anarchism

3 notes · View notes

thepeoplesspeechwriter · 7 years

Text

Thomas Paine’s 2015 Speech Transcript

There always exist men who delight themselves by being the opposition to everything. Even when such an existence leads to opposing ideas which are supported by the common people. These men exist on both sides of government. The senators and congressmen argue about their trivial differences. Anyone can pronounce their difference but it is another matter entirely to prove as such. The only true distinction is that they are referred to with different names. They claim separate mascots but only one fits the both of them.

The branches of government have become an aristocracy. Those of the legislative and executive especially. Notice that they are elected bodies. In order to campaign for an election it seems one must have an exorbitant amount of money. Here and there we see a common man who has worked his way to wealth. Still, it is the wealthy who rule the nation. The wealthy approve legislation that the rest of us must abide by. Do they understand the hardship of the laborer? Of the poor? Do they not have the chance to speak for themselves? One might say they do with elections. Do they? When the only choice is of those with wealth?

Each election cycle invokes groans and early resignation. The people resign themselves with a candidate who is a little more preferable to the other one. It has become a time obsessed with parties that mean nothing because little real difference is made. Policies differ here and there but earth shaking promises always fall short. People are also quick to pronounce their disappointment in the governing power. They are quick to believe nothing will change. Perhaps it won’t with the way the system is now.

Government was formed at the consent of the people. People allow themselves to be governed. So when did we become so passive as to silently complain about the degradation of our nation. We are displeased with unfair laws that won’t change yet we continue the vote for same old each cycle. We consent tacitly they say by living in society. Government came out from society not the other way around. How do we give consent by merely living? The people must give consent to be governed not just by electing officials. Every so often there should be a complete overhaul of the system for the people to decide if they want to continue on the same course. Only then can real change be established.

This idea of consent aligns with that of a living breathing constitution. It is one thing to say that we need to change with the times and another thing to actually allow this to happen. We cannot hope to change or force it in a system that will not allow it. To change with the times means exactly that. The government must change, must evolve to the will of the people.

Elections themselves must be held often to make a difference. This way new candidates will enter the mix and the same old people will not continue to be elected on the basis of the only choice. Frequent elections allow for a variety of people to campaign and be elected. People with different viewpoints and experience.

The same people who tote about the Bill of Rights as if it was a direct message from God are the same who deny rights to future generations. It is not the senator’s purpose to pick and choose which rights suit him. It is his duty to preserve and abide by all rights. Our country was founded on the principle of freedom for all. Government by its own nature is oppressive. Any body that dictates what one may and may not do is just that. Oppressive though it might be it is still necessary in a large society. Its continued existence is allowed on the requirement that the government protects the rights of the people. It is the sole purpose of government as it is why governments are established. We would not give our rights for the sole purpose of being oppressed. No, we abide by laws, though they restrict our rights, so that we may keep them. So that they are not in danger from any other.

We cannot violate another’s right. It is our duty not to do such. If we did commit this violation we would suffer the consequences. In this society our morals act as a compulsion, for if I were to violate my neighbor’s rights my own could just as easily be forgone. It is as such that it is our right to do as we please until it threatens our neighbors’ own rights. Now we must ask ourselves: to whom do these rights belong? One might easily look at our Declaration and the Constitution and say to all people. All people are born equal, with natural rights that cannot be deprived. All people are born with these rights. Thus it is that generations ahead of our own will be born with these rights. They too have rights just as we do. To deny this is to deny the foundation of our nation.

Shall we deprive future generations of life? Of fresh air, of clean water, of natural resources? Do not they deserve the same quality of life that we are able to strive to achieve? What hope is there for them if the world cannot provide them with basic necessities? Necessities needed to live. Every day we pollute the world and every day we lose more trees, more natural resources. Every day that we allow this to continue is a day that may diminish a future generation’s right to live. We owe it to them and each other to protect the environment and our water systems. Water conservation and exploring sustainability are all things that we can and should do. Water, being necessary for survival, requires that it be protected and have minimal pollutants.

The right of life continues and rams into another right, the one of liberty. Abortion has been heavily discussed among the people and has left a rather jagged divide. It would be ideal for many to not take a stance and to ignore it. This does not make the issue disappear. We find that a religious argument always makes its appearance here. That is not the sole argument one can make. One can make a basis on the grounds of the duty we owe to our children. If future generations have a right to live, then we reach a conclusion to the issue. But not quite it would seem as it is then that the issue of liberty is brought into the fray.

Women have the liberty to make their decision without government forcing them one way or another. We always strive for greater liberty when we can, though in times of peril this often rings false. We come to the question of liberty or life? We have allowed government to control our liberty in some instances for safety, property, and for life. One must decide which is the greater sacrifice to derive at the answer.

Returning to the modern aristocracy, we must give more thought to the furthering of this elite group. Inheritance has allowed people who did not work for this money or property to take it all upon the death of a loved one. Already there is an unequal advantage amongst people and this furthers it. We value property but we forget that property belongs to those that owned, to those that had taken care of it. Those who would be inheritors must go out and acquire property and money through work as all must. America rejected divine right. Is this not a form of succession?

America has gone far from the ideas of the Revolution. We revolted against Britain, against tyranny. Now we are subjected to the tyranny of aristocrats, of our government. The people are waylaid from equality and true representation. What representation is there when there is no real consent? We are now represented by old standards and have adapted ones slapped on by cheap glue. Elections are few and far between and offer little choice. The wealthy are empowered and know little about the plights of the farmer or laborer. The government comes from the people and it should continue to come from the people.

#politics #social justice #Thomas paine #liberty #government #elections #civil rights #elitism

2 notes · View notes

loneberry · 8 years

Text

Poetry, therefore, is not what we simply recognize as the formal “poem,” but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking.

[Currently re-reading one of my favorite books of all time--Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination--for an essay I am writing on the prison abolitionist imagination. Here is the first chapter.]

“WHEN HISTORY SLEEPS”: A BEGINNING

When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams: on the brow of the sleeping people, the poem is a constellation of blood…. --Octavio Paz, “Toward the Poem”

My mother has a tendency to dream out loud. I think it has something to do with her regular morning meditation. In the quiet darkness of her bedroom her third eye opens onto a new world, a beautiful light-filled place as peaceful as her state of mind. She never had to utter a word to describe her inner peace; like morning sunlight, it radiated out to everyone in her presence. My mother knows this, which is why for the past two decades she has taken the name Ananda (“bliss”). Her other two eyes never let her forget where we lived. The cops, drug dealers, social workers, the rusty tapwater, roaches and rodents, the urine-scented hallways, and the piles of garbage were constant reminders that our world began and ended in a battered Harlem/Washington Heights tenement apartment on 157th and Amsterdam.

Yet she would not allow us to live as victims. Instead, we were a family of caretakers who inherited this earth. We were expected to help any living creature in need, even if that meant giving up our last piece of bread. Strange, needy people always passed through our house, occasionally staying for long stretches of time. (My mom once helped me bring home a New York City pigeon with a broken leg in a failed effort to nurse her back to health!) We were expected to stand apart from the crowd and befriend the misfits, to embrace the kids who stuttered, smelled bad, or had holes in their clothes. My mother taught us that the Marvelous was free—in the patterns of a stray bird feather, in a Hudson River sunset, in the view from our fire escape, in the stories she told us, in the way she sang Gershwin’s “Summertime,” in a curbside rainbow created by the alchemy of motor oil and water from an open hydrant. She simply wanted us to live through our third eyes, to see life as possibility. She wanted us to imagine a world free of patriarchy, a world where gender and sexual relations could be reconstructed. She wanted us to see the poetic and prophetic in the richness of our daily lives. She wanted us to visualize a more expansive, fluid, “cosmos-politan” definition of blackness, to teach us that we are not merely inheritors of a culture but its makers.

So with her eyes wide open my mother dreamed and dreamed some more, describing what life could be for us. She wasn’t talking about a postmortem world, some kind of heaven or afterlife; and she was not speaking of reincarnation (which she believes in, by the way). She dreamed of land, a spacious house, fresh air, organic food, and endless meadows without boundaries, free of evil and violence, free of toxins and environmental hazards, free of poverty, racism, and sexism … just free. She never talked about how we might create such a world, nor had she connected her vision to any political ideology. But she convinced my siblings and me that change is possible and that we didn’t have to be stuck there forever.

The idea that we could possibly go somewhere that exists only in our imaginations—that is, “nowhere”—is the classic definition of utopia. Call me utopian, but I inherited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us. Now that I look back with hindsight, my writing and the kind of politics to which I’ve been drawn have more to do with imagining a different future than being pissed off about the present. Not that I haven’t been angry, frustrated, and critical of the misery created by race, gender, and class oppression—past and present. That goes without saying. My point is that the dream of a new world, my mother’s dream, was the catalyst for my own political engagement. I came to black nationalism filled with idealistic dreams of a communal society free of all oppressions, a world where we owned the land and shared the wealth and white folks were out of sight and out of mind. It was what I imagined precolonial Africa to be. Sure, I was naive, still in my teens, but my imaginary portrait, derived from the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Ture, and others, gave me a sense of hope and possibility of what a postcolonial Africa could look like.

Very quickly, I learned that the old past wasn’t as glorious, peaceful, or communal as I had thought—though I still believe that it was many times better than what we found when we got to the Americas. The stories from the former colonies—whether Mobutu’s Zaire, Amin’s Uganda, or Forbes Burnham’s Guyana—dashed most of my expectations about what it would take to achieve real freedom. In college, like all the other neophyte revolutionaries influenced by events in southern Africa, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Cuba and Grenada, I studied Third World liberation movements and postemancipation societies in the hope of discovering different visions of freedom born out of the circumstances of struggle. I looked in vain for glimmers of a new society, in the “liberated zones” of Portugal’s African colonies during the wars of independence, in Maurice Bishop’s “New Jewel” movement in Grenada, in Guyana’s tragically short-lived nineteenth-century communal villages, in the brief moment when striking workers of Congo-Brazzaville momentarily seized state power and were poised to establish Africa’s first workers’ state. Granted, all these movements crashed against the rocks, wrecked by various internal and external forces, but they left behind at least some kind of vision, however fragmented or incomplete, of what they wanted their world to look like.

Like most of my comrades active in the early days of the Reagan era, I turned to Marxism for the same reasons I looked to the Third World. The misery of the proletariat (lumpen and otherwise) proved less interesting and less urgent than the promise of revolution. I was attracted to “small c” communism because, in theory, it sought to harness technology to solve human needs, give us less work and more leisure, and free us all to create, invent, explore, love, relax, and enjoy life without want of the basic necessities of life. My big sister Makani and I used to preach to others about the end of money; the withering away of poverty, property, and the state; and the destruction of the material basis for racism and patriarchy. I fell in love with the young Marx of The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, the visionary Marx who predicted the abolition of all exploitative institutions. I followed young Marx, via the late English historian Edward P. Thompson, to those romantic renegade socialists like William Morris who wanted to break with all vestiges of capitalist production and rationalization. Morris was less concerned with socialist efficiency than with transforming social relations and constructing new, free, democratic communities built on, as Thompson put it, “the ethic of cooperation, the energies of love.”

There are very few contemporary political spaces where the energies of love and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces. The socialists, utopian and scientific, had little to say about this, so my search for an even more elaborate, complete dream of freedom forced me to take a more imaginative turn. Thanks to many wonderful chance encounters with Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, Ted Joans, Laura Corsiglia, and Jayne Cortez, I discovered surrealism, not so much in the writings and doings of André Breton or Louis Aragon or other leaders of the surrealist movement that emerged in Paris after World War I, but under my nose, so to speak, buried in the rich, black soil of Afrodiasporic culture. In it I found a most miraculous weapon with no birth date, no expiration date, no trademark. I traced the Marvelous from the ancient practices of Maroon societies and shamanism back to the future, to the metropoles of Europe, to the blues people of North America, to the colonized and semicolonized world that produced the likes of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and Wifredo Lam. The surrealists not only taught me that any serious motion toward freedom must begin in the mind, but they have also given us some of the most imaginative, expansive, and playful dreams of a new world I have ever known. Contrary to popular belief, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine but an international revolutionary movement concerned with the emancipation of thought. According to the Chicago Surrealist Group,

Surrealism is the exaltation of freedom, revolt, imagination and love. . . . Its basic aim is to lessen and eventually to completely resolve the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams. By definition subversive, surrealist thought and action are intended not only to discredit and destroy the forces of re- pression, but also to emancipate desire and supply it with new poetic weapons. . . . Beginning with the abolition of imaginative slavery, it advances to the creation of a free society in which everyone will be a poet—a society in which everyone will be able to develop his or her potentialities fully and freely.

Members of the Surrealist Group in Madrid, for example, see their work as an intervention in life rather than literature, a protracted battle against all forms of oppression that aims to replace “suspicion, fear and anger with curiosity, adventure and desire” and “a model space for collective living—a space from which separation and isolation are banished forever.”

The surrealists are talking about total transformation of society, not just granting aggrieved populations greater political and economic power. They are speaking of new social relationships, new ways of living and interacting, new attitudes toward work and leisure and community. In this respect, they share much with radical feminists whose revolutionary vision extended into every aspect of social life. Radical feminists taught us that there is nothing natural or inevitable about gender roles, male dominance, the overrepresentation of men in positions of power, or the tendency of men to use violence as a means to resolve conflict. Radical feminists of color, in particular, reveal how race, gender, and class work in tandem to subordinate most of society while complicating easy notions of universal sisterhood or biological arguments that establish men as the universal enemy. Like all the other movements that caught my attention, radical feminism, as well as the ideas emerging out of the lesbian and gay movements, proved attractive not simply for their critiques of patriarchy but for their freedom dreams. The work of these movements taken as a whole interrogates what is “normal”; shows us how the state and official culture polices our behavior with regard to sexuality, gender roles, and social relationships; and encourages us to construct a politics rooted in desire.

Black intellectuals associated with each of these movements not only imagined a different future, but in many instances their emancipatory vision proved more radical and inclusive than what their compatriots proposed.* Indeed, throughout the book I argue that these renegade black intellectuals/activists/artists challenged and reshaped communism, surrealism, and radical feminism, and in so doing produced brilliant theoretical insights that might have pushed these movements in new directions. In most cases, however, the critical visions of black radicals were held at bay, if not completely marginalized. Of course, there are many people still struggling to realize these dreams—extending, elaborating, and refining their vision as the battle wears on. This book is about those dreams of freedom; it is merely a brief, idiosyncratic outline of a history of black radical imagination in the twentieth century. I don’t pretend to have written anything approaching a movement history or an intellectual history, and I am not interested in explaining why these dreams of revolution have not succeeded (yet!). Rather, I simply want to explore the different ways self-proclaimed renegades imagined life after the revolution and where their ideas came from. Although Freedom Dreams is no memoir, it is a very personal book. It is loosely organized around my own political journey, around the dreams I once shared or still share—from the dreams of an African utopia to the surreal world of our imagination, from the communist and feminist dreams of abolishing all forms of exploitation to the four-hundred-year-old dream of payback for slavery and Jim Crow.

My purpose in writing this book is simply to reopen a very old conversation about what kind of world we want to struggle for. I’m not the only one interested in the work of dreaming—obviously there are many activists and thinkers having this conversation right now, ranging from my sister Makani Themba-Nixon, Cornel West, and Lian and Eric Mann to Cleveland’s Norma Jean Freeman and Don Freeman, Newark’s Amina and Amiri Baraka, and Detroit’s Grace Lee Boggs, to name but a few. For decades, these and other folks have dared to talk openly of revolution and dream of a new society, sometimes creating cultural works that enable communities to envision what’s possible with collective action, personal self-transformation, and will.

I did not write this book for those traditional leftists who have traded in their dreams for orthodoxy and sectarianism. Most of those folks are hopeless, I’m sad to say. And they will be the first to dismiss this book as utopian, idealistic, and romantic. Instead, I wrote it for anyone bold enough still to dream, especially young people who are growing up in what critic Henry Giroux perceptively calls “the culture of cynicism”—young people whose dreams have been utterly coopted by the marketplace. In a world where so many youth believe that “getting paid” and living ostentatiously was the goal of the black freedom movement, there is little space to even discuss building a radical democratic public culture. Too many young people really believe that this is the best we can do. Young faces, however, have been popping up en masse at the antiglobalization demonstrations beginning in Seattle in 1999, and the success of the college antisweatshop campaign No Sweat owes much of its success to a growing number of radicalized students. The Black Radical Congress, launched in 1997, has attracted hundreds of activists under age twenty-five, and so has the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. So there is hope.

The question remains: What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for? These are crucial questions, for one of the basic premises of this book is that the most powerful, visionary dreams of a new society don’t come from little think tanks of smart people or out of the atomized, individualistic world of consumer capitalism where raging against the status quo is simply the hip thing to do. Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge. While this may seem obvious, I am increasingly surrounded by well-meaning students who want to be activists but exhibit anxiety about doing intellectual work. They often differentiate the two, positioning activism and intellectual work as inherently incompatible. They speak of the “real” world as some concrete wilderness overrun with violence and despair, and the university as if it were some sanitized sanctuary distant from actual people’s lives and struggles. At the other extreme, I have had students argue that the problems facing “real people” today can be solved by merely bridging the gap between our superior knowledge and people outside the ivy walls who simply do not have access to that knowledge. Unwitting advocates of a kind of “talented tenth” ideology of racial uplift, their stated goal is to “reach the people” with more “accessible” knowledge, to carry back to the ‘hood the information folks need to liberate themselves. While it is heartening to see young people excited about learning and cognizant of the political implications of knowledge, it worries me when they believe that simply “droppin’ science” on the people will generate new, liberatory social movements.

I am convinced that the opposite is true: Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression. For example, the academic study of race has always been inextricably intertwined with political struggles. Just as imperialism, colonialism, and post-Reconstruction redemption politics created the intellectual ground for Social Darwinism and other manifestations of scientific racism, the struggle against racism generated cultural relativist and social constructionist scholarship on race. The great works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Franz Boas, Oliver Cox, and many others were invariably shaped by social movements as well as social crises such as the proliferation of lynching and the rise of fascism. Similarly, gender analysis was brought to us by the feminist movement, not simply by the individual genius of the Grimke sisters or Anna Julia Cooper, Simone de Beauvoir, or Audre Lorde. Thinking on gender and the possibility of transformation evolved largely in relationship to social struggle.

Progressive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way. It is that imagination, that effort to see the future in the present, that I shall call “poetry” or “poetic knowledge.” I take my lead from Aimé Césaire’s great essay “Poetry and Knowledge,” first published in 1945. Opening with the simple but provocative proposition that “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge,” he then demonstrates why poetry is the only way to achieve the kind of knowledge we need to move beyond the world’s crises. “What presides over the poem,” he writes, “is not the most lucid intelligence, the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole.” This means everything, every history, every future, every dream, every life form from plant to animal, every creative impulse—plumbed from the depths of the unconscious. Poetry, therefore, is not what we simply recognize as the formal “poem,” but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking. Consider Césaire’s third proposition regarding poetic knowledge: “Poetic knowledge is that in which man spatters the object with all of his mobilized riches.”

In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born. Recovering the poetry of social movements, however, particularly the poetry that dreams of a new world, is not such an easy task. For obvious reasons, what we are against tends to take precedence over what we are for, which is always a more complicated and ambiguous matter. It is a testament to the legacies of oppression that opposition is so frequently contained, or that efforts to find “free spaces” for articulating or even realizing our dreams are so rare or marginalized. George Lipsitz helps explain the problem when he writes in Dangerous Crossroads, “The desire to work through existing contradictions rather than stand outside them represents not so much a preference for melioristic reform over revolutionary change, but rather a recognition of the impossibility of standing outside totalitarian systems of domination.” Besides, even if we could gather together our dreams of a new world, how do we figure them out in a culture dominated by the marketplace? How can social movements actually reshape the desires and dreams of the participants?

Another problem, of course, is that such dreaming is often suppressed and policed not only by our enemies but by leaders of social movements themselves. The utopian visions of male nationalists or so-called socialists often depend on the suppression of women, of youth, of gays and lesbians, of people of color. Desire can be crushed by so-called revolutionary ideology. I don’t know how many times self-proclaimed leftists talk of universalizing “working-class culture,” focusing only on what they think is uplifting and politically correct but never paying attention to, say, the ecstatic. I remember attending a conference in Vermont about the future of socialism, where a bunch of us got into a fight with an older generation of white leftists who proposed replacing retrograde “pop” music with the revolutionary “working-class” music of Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie, preelectric Bob Dylan, and songs from the Spanish Civil War. And there I was, comically screaming at the top of my lungs, “No way! After the revolution, we STILL want Bootsy! That’s right, we want Bootsy! We need the funk!”

Sometimes I think the conditions of daily life, of everyday oppressions, of survival, not to mention the temporary pleasures accessible to most of us, render much of our imagination inert. We are constantly putting out fires, responding to emergencies, finding temporary refuge, all of which make it difficult to see anything other than the present. As the great poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, “When the clouds clear / We shall know the colour of the sky.” When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets—no matter the medium—who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling. This is what poet Askia Muhammad Toure meant when, in a 1964 article in Liberator magazine, he called black rhythm-and-blues artists “poet philosophers” and described their music as a “potent weapon in the black freedom struggle.” For Toure, the “movement” was more than sit-ins at lunch counters, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; it was about self-transformation, changing the way we think, live, love, and handle pain. While the music frequently negatively mirrored the larger culture, it nonetheless helped generate community pride, challenged racial self-hatred, and built self-respect. It created a world of pleasure, not just to escape the everyday brutalities of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but to build community, establish fellowship, play and laugh, and plant seeds for a different way of living, a different way of hearing. As Amiri Baraka put it in his famous essay, “The Changing Same,” black music has the potential to usher in a new future based on love: “The change to Love. The freedom to (of) Love.”

Freedom and love may be the most revolutionary ideas available to us, and yet as intellectuals we have failed miserably to grapple with their political and analytical importance. Despite having spent a decade and a half writing about radical social movements, I am only just beginning to see what animated, motivated, and knitted together these gatherings of aggrieved folk. I have come to realize that once we strip radical social movements down to their bare essence and understand the collective desires of people in motion, freedom and love lay at the very heart of the matter. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that freedom and love constitute the foundation for spirituality, another elusive and intangible force with which few scholars of social movements have come to terms. These insights were always there in the movements I’ve studied, but I was unable to see it, acknowledge it, or bring it to the surface. I hope this little book might be a beginning.

#robin kelley #freedom dreams #race #poetry #literature #marxism #theory #black marxism #surrealism #jazz #blues #history #love #revolution #struggle

32 notes · View notes

kartiavelino · 6 years

Text

André Holland Takes On The NBA In ’High Flying Bird’

“The timing is auspicious,” André Holland admits with a mischievous but welcoming smile. On this busy Thursday morning in February, the NBA is wrought with pressure of an impending commerce deadline and the NBA All-Star draft being televised that evening. Holland’s Netflix movie Excessive Flying Chicken tells the story of an bold—if not determined—sports activities agent named Ray Burke, who’s attempting to maintain his head above water throughout an NBA lockout. Certainly one of his purchasers is an anxious rookie named Eric Scott (performed by The Land’s Melvin Gregg), who has but to set foot on the court docket however has already landed himself into some off-court drama. Holland is a fan of the sport and even balled out slightly in highschool, however even he couldn’t have scripted the timing for his movie’s launch any higher. His eyes widen as I inform him about Harrison Barnes being traded from the Dallas Mavericks mid-game the evening earlier than. The 39-year-old from Bessemer, Alabama, shouldn’t be on Twitter, so he additionally hasn’t seen Kevin Durant berating the press for asking about his impending free company in a post-game interview. He hovers over my laptop computer as I pull up the video of the Golden State All-Star fuming into the mic. “That’s a dialog you all have. I don’t take into consideration that form of stuff. It’s not vital.” It’s the form of actual life drama that his character Ray would salivate over, utilizing the discontent of the athletes to spark a revolution in “the sport on high of the sport.” 5 years in the past, when Holland first acquired the inspiration to make this movie, former L.A. Clippers proprietor Donald Sterling was being banned from the NBA for making racist feedback in a personal telephone name. The contentious relationship between the vastly white staff house owners in skilled sports activities and their largely African-American gamers is on the coronary heart of Excessive Flying Chicken’s story, and one which Tarell Alvin McCraney (co-writer of Moonlight) and director Steven Soderbergh seize in a really slick and minimalist means. Zazie Beetz, Sonja Sohn, Zachary Quinto and Invoice Duke spherical out a sensible and entertaining ensemble who inform a compelling sports activities story that even non-sports followers can get pleasure from. André Holland spoke with BET.com about reuniting with Steven Soderbergh, who directed him within the Cinemax drama The Knick, and McCraney, whom he labored with on Moonlight, to shake up the video games of each movie and sports activities. BET: How would you fee your basketball abilities on a scale of 1 to 10? André Holland: That’s a difficult query, man, as a result of I can’t say one. I performed fairly good. I performed level in highschool and will sustain with nearly anyone. However I ain’t gonna take over a recreation. I can go fairly good. I’m a reasonably good shooter. This was John Carol in Alabama. They gained the State Championship the 12 months after I left, so I prefer to say that I used to be foundational to that. [laughs]. So when did you first get the thought to make Excessive Flying Chicken? It was about 5 years in the past when Steven and I had been engaged on The Knick collectively and I used to be on the lookout for tasks to do and I wasn’t getting that many scripts. I discovered myself getting pissed off about that. So, quite than get pissed off, I assumed, what if we make one thing? So I began to pitch him some concepts that I had and out of these conversations got here this concept. Then I introduced Tarell in. We return to ’06, we did a bunch of performs collectively. This was means earlier than Moonlight. We had been each in grad faculty on the identical time. He was at Yale and I used to be at NYU. So we acquired launched by way of a mutual good friend. I did his first play in New York, just about all his performs. The first one was known as Wig Out. Tarell wrote it, I used to be in it, Sterling Okay. Brown was in it, Brian Tyree Henry was in it. Rutina Wesley was in it. It was robust. We had a powerful group. How lengthy did that run? We did it first at Sundance on the theater lab. That was like a three-week workshop course of and the brand new introduced it to New York for like six weeks. So it is a double reunion for you. What was it like bringing Soderbergh and Tarell collectively? It was superb. Me and Steven had been assembly recurrently, after which Tarell got here in and I organized this dinner for us. It was actually cool to take a seat there and see the 2 of them, who each have these huge brains and nice minds, simply going at it, and I acquired to be a fly on the wall. It felt actually good to deliver these two worlds collectively. How a lot of Algernon’s (the surgeon you performed in The Knick) spirit is in Ray? That’s an excellent query. Rather a lot. I feel. I like these characters… I feel they each have a little bit of a chip on their shoulders. They each have some trauma from their previous that may be a bit unresolved, and so they each are decided to go away one thing good on this planet. They’re each a bit smug. Just a little bit. [laughs]. However I feel they’ve so much in widespread, and that most likely says one thing about me. That I’ve… there is part of me that’s at all times felt—and I feel a part of it’s coming from Alabama—a bit like I’ve one thing to show. All of us grew up listening to that you must be twice nearly as good… Did you mannequin Ray after any brokers that you realize? A bit. There are some brokers that I met with, and I form of took components of every of them. This one agent hipped me to one thing I wasn’t conscious of. He’s been within the recreation for a very long time, and the way in which he pertains to his gamers, it’s not simply as an agent. It’s far more like a member of the family. [He was] the man who went in very early on, earlier than any contracts had been signed, and sat down with their households. He’s an agent, good friend, mentor. So I felt like that form of relationship is the form of relationship Ray would have together with his purchasers, particularly as a Black man working on this largely white company bringing in these Black gamers. He would wish to be as near his guys as attainable. And but, his personal trauma of getting misplaced his cousin retains him from getting too concerned. There’s this distance that he tries to maintain. When he’s lecturing Eric he clearly loves him and needs him to do effectively, however there’s a distance he desires to attempt to maintain. You bought two nice younger skills in Melvin and Zazie. What was it like working with them? They had been each dope. Melvin I actually admire as a result of I didn’t know him earlier than. However I’ve come to know his [story]. This cat has been telling his personal tales and taking pictures his personal brief movies. He has his personal manufacturing studio in L.A. He’s making stuff on a regular basis. We shot the film on iPhone, and in a means, he was extra skilled than anyone. He actually acquired into it. A whole lot of his stuff tends to be comedic, so it was cool to see him do one thing extra dramatic. Then with Zazie, I feel she is a star. Flat out, no query about it. Go so far as she desires to go star. She’s good as a whip, clearly stunning, proficient, a sort individual. So cool to hang around with. I feel she’s superb. What was your relationship like with the NBA whereas making the movie? I personally didn’t have a relationship. It was Steven’s concept to intercut the participant interviews. So I’m curious to see what different gamers give it some thought, the NBA thinks. I hope they don’t take it as an assault. As a result of it’s not meant to be. I feel the NBA has finished actually nice issues for his or her gamers as say in comparison with the NFL. We simply use this as a chance to pose the query: What if there was extra Black possession? And that applies not simply to the NBA however to the NFL, the NCAA, to company America. Simply every thing. Any hopes for a collection? We undoubtedly wish to do a sequel. I’ve an early concept about that. If this goes effectively and folks actually reply to it and Dr. Edwards and I’ve been speaking a few sequel. How did you meet Dr. Edwards and turn into aware of his e-book The Revolt of the Black Athlete? I’ve a good friend Onaje Woodbine, he was there final evening, he wrote a e-book known as Black Gods of the Asphalt. Which is a dope, dope e-book across the spirituality round road basketball. In speaking to him he educated me about Dr. Edwards, and I reached out to him. I learn his e-book and we talked much more. To me, his involvement was every thing. He helped us to grasp that this concept was not a brand new concept. He’s been doing this work for 50 years. From the Olympic protests in ’68 all the way in which to now with Colin Kaepernick. The first draft of the script he learn he was like, “Not that, not that.” He helped us so much. Are you able to specify one factor he felt you bought fallacious? There was one factor he talked about. For instance, I used to be involved about not making the Eric Scott character really feel two-dimensional. I didn’t need him to return off like a “dumb athlete.” So what would he say right here? How would he categorical himself right here? However once I spoke to Dr. Edwards, he stated, “Simply because he ain’t speaking don’t imply he ain’t considering. A whole lot of these guys have very, very energetic brains. He won’t be saying a lot, however it’s about how he’s taking info in.” That’s what we form of went for. In that first scene, he doesn’t speak a lot. He listens so much. However we see him analyzing and evaluating. So by the top, when he finds that e-book, it feels just like the start of an activist, a man who’s on the cusp of discovery. Together with your movie popping out on the identical day as Taraji’s sports activities agent movie, What Males Need, is that this chatting with a rising variety within the selection of tasks for Black producers and actors? I hope so. Evidently there are extra fascinating tasks being finished, and locations like Netflix have made that attainable. It’s definitely an thrilling time for me to be on this place, as a result of there are such a lot of different issues I wish to do. My hope is that my manufacturing firm can have an on-going relationship right here at Netflix as we proceed to supply increasingly content material. Excessive Flying Chicken is streaming on Netflix now! http://feeds.bet.com/~r/Betcom-Celebrities/~3/OG_4j4QqCi0/andre-holland-interview-high-flying-bird.html The post André Holland Takes On The NBA In ’High Flying Bird’ appeared first on My style by Kartia. https://www.kartiavelino.com/2019/02/andre-holland-takes-on-the-nba-in-high-flying-bird.html

0 notes