The English poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827) left a body of breathtaking art and stirring, sometimes obscure poetry, much of it concerned with religion and much with the revolutionary struggles of his time—the American and French revolutions, the British radical movement of the 1790s, and later, the growing British labor and constitutional movement in the years 1810-1820. Blake's major poems—which are also beautiful artworks incorporating his own illustrations—include those collected in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789-1794); short narrative works like The Book of Urizen, America a Prophecy, and Europe a Prophecy, all written in the 1790s; and three long, complex narrative poems, The Four Zoas (1797-180... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Quick Notes on the Unfolding Revolt—By Christopher Z. Hobson
The sky is bright over northern Africa, not only because of the burning government buildings and police stations, but because of the new dawn of mass struggle and potential liberation. Since Jan. 14, less than three weeks ago, the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia has fallen and its successor regime has been shaken up several times, the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt has suffered a mighty blow from ever-growing protests seeking the president’s downfall, and more restrained demonstrations have started against the Saleh dictatorship in Yemen. The situation changes hour by hour and people all over the world hope for the protesters’ success. Here are a few notes in s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “No one has ever given me a chance; I am just angry at how the whole system works” – Louis James, 19, Camden Town (North London)
“You know you all racist! You know it!” – unidentified protester, to London police
Decent people everywhere should support and defend the working class and street youth – mainly but not only AfroCaribbeans – who rioted and looted in London, Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere in England for several days starting August 6. They have been called “thugs” and worse by the Conservative government of prime minister David Cameron, but it is these leaders who are the real thugs in Britain today. Nonetheless while the riots were a real and welcome fi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Bruce Augustyniak, also known as Bruce Kala, died in Chicago on September 6, 2002. Bruce was a longtime socialist and anarchist who was trained as a scientist and gave up what presumably would have been a lucrative career to be a revolutionary. He devoted his whole adult life to this work, as a member of the International Socialists from 1970 to 1973, the Revolutionary Socialist League from 1973 until 1989, and the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation from 1989 to 1998. During the 1970s and 1980s he worked in the U.S. Post Office in Chicago, in other industries in Los Angeles, and as a teacher in New York,and helped produce the RSL’s newspaper, The Torch/La Antorcha, and a book, Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism, by ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) As this is written in mid-February, Shali, Samashki, Argun and other towns around the Chechen capital, Grozny, where Chechen forces have regrouped, are taking the full brunt of Russian fighter-bomber attacks, tank barrages, and mortar bombardments. In Grozny itself, thousands of buildings have only a wall or two standing. For nearly 10 weeks after the Russians invaded on Dec. 11 to reverse a 1991 declaration of independence, fighters in Grozny resisted block by block. Now, fewer than a hundred thousand people pick for food in what was once a city of 400,000. Moving on, Russian forces level the countryside of a tiny country that Russia originally conquered by force only 135 years ago.
Russian announcements follow a well-thumbed script. A &l... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) If John Brown were permitted to speak to us today from heaven, where he has been now for fifty years, he would say to us, I believe, Never despair! Never give up! The forces that are for you are greater than those that are against you. Be patient; be earnest; be aggressive. […] Back of all the forces that have been put in operation for the uplift of your race, from the beginning to the present, God has been, and still is. […] And will he now desert you? Will he leave you naked to the tender mercies of your enemies? Never. God doesn’t work that way; that is not his way of doing things. […] God never would have brought you thus far unless he meant to stand by you. (Francis Grimké, Memorial Sermon on John Brow... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) so
the body
of one black man
is rag and stone
is mud
and blood
the body of one
black man
contains no life
worth loving
so the body
of one black man
is nobody
—Lucille Clifton, from “4/30/92 for rodney king”
As all the world knows now, on November 24 the St. Louis County prosecutor announced that a grand jury that had been sitting for three months had decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing Michael Brown, 18,who was unarmed, on August 9. Residents of Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis that is about 2/3 Black, began protesting at Police Headquarters immediately after the announcement, and in a short time began breaking ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) (Author’s note: I’ve been working for several years on a book about James Baldwin’s use of religious language to describe social and sexual transformation. Baldwin (1924–1987), once seen as belonging to a past era, has grown in relevance as his uncanny ability to speak to America’s sins of exclusion and blindness have seemed more and more timely. So it felt appropriate to ask what he would say today. I asked him to choose five quotations from his works that he thought most applicable to the present occasion. He cheated a little, insisting on two for his third selection. The quotations are followed by our back-and-forth comments, which, obviously, are imagined.)
The world is white no longer, and it will nev... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Two weeks after Egypt’s revolution, the firestorm of people’s uprisings that is transforming the Middle East continues, and yet the ruling elites are reasserting themselves, threatening to destroy everything the people have suffered and sacrificed for. Part of the mortal danger to the still-bright rebellions comes from these elites, part from the United States, and part from the class nature of the rebellions themselves. That is a bitter pill to swallow, but it is the truth.
Libya, Yemen, Bahrain
For the last ten days as I write on Feb. 27, the struggle in Libya has taken center stage. An armed rebellion against Muammar al-Qaddafi that began in the anti-Qaddafi eastern city of Benghazi has taken over much of the country. Man... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) As most people know, in January and February Muslims demonstrated in many countries over the publication of satirical cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in European newspapers. The cartoons showed the prophet in a variety of ways meant to satirize him and Muslim belief, for example, with bombs in his head covering. They were first published in a Danish newspaper last September and then, when demonstrations began, were republished by a sizable number of other European newspapers acting in support of the first. Some of the demonstrations drew tens of thousands of people. Some have involved mob violence—attacks on Danish embassies,deaths from police gunfire—while others have featured symbolic destruction such as flag burning but over... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Naomi Weisstein—scientist, feminist, irreverent and undeferential intelligence, and, with her husband Jesse Lemisch, a longtime friend of The Utopian—died March 26, 2015, after an agonizing struggle with cancer and a decades-long struggle against disabling illness that never destroyed her spunk and humor. In this brief note we can only mention briefly a few of her achievements. (See the links below for more extensive information.)
As an experimental psychologist, Weisstein’s work focused on the agency of the brain in forming perceptions. In six major articles published in the leading journal Science from 1970 to 1982, and others elsewhere, Naomi made the case for contextual recognition in visual perception—that reco... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Author’s Note: My friend and teaching colleague Nicholas Powers first had the idea of writing an essay applying “double consciousness” to Obama. Unconsciously I picked up his idea. However, his approach, focusing on Obama’s autobiographical writings, is distinct from mine. What is here, including its errors, is my own responsibility.
When I try to sort out my sense of events since the election of President Obama—my senses both that this election was a major watershed in U.S. politics and society, and that Obama’s presidency will realize few if any of the hopes people had in voting for him—I find myself drawn to a fundamental idea in African American writing about the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois&r... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) September 27, 2001
I took advantage of a day off—and the occasion of Yom Kippur seemed right—to go to the World Trade Center site. With a friend I approached southward along Church Street and then west to the Hudson River. From these vantage points one is half a mile away and sees the site only through gaps in the buildings; so we circled around and approached on the east side, along Broadway, where one can walk within a few blocks of the ruins. The scene is very grim. The crowds are kept some blocks away from the actual destruction, and one does not see anything not already seen more clearly in photographs, but it is entirely different to be there. The sense of reality is heightened by the still-acrid air that makes eyes sting... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) From my point of view, the armed attacks that killed at least 129 people and wounded 352 in Paris on Nov. 13 are not only morally and humanly wrong, but also have nothing in common with revolutionary action. Revolutionaries should condemn the attacks, not feel any solidarity with the attackers, and not defend them against the state—as we would with a wide variety of revolutionary activists whom we might oppose politically. This said, it’s important not to lose sight of the larger truth that the various imperialist powers—the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, Germany, and France itself—remain the main perpetrators of terror and destruction in the Middle East and elsewhere.
While all the evidence isn’t in, it seems l... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) One weakness of much radical thought is its use of abstract, formalized categories and a reductionist method. Radical theories often begin with some area of social existence—the nation and national identity, the system of production and class, race/ethnicity, gender, and others—that they use as a basic category to explain social life. Though there is nothing wrong with using such categories, they are most often reified, that is, treated as real and objective; for example, gender theories assume that people really are of one gender or another, whether “essential” or “socially constructed,” rather than that gender is an idea that partly explains some ways people act. Radical theories further often take a re... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It has taken me two years to write about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ best-selling book essay Between the World and Me, an exploration of the endangerment of the Black body in the United States. I bought the book shortly after its July 2015 publication but didn’t read it for a year, and it’s taken another year to write about it. Part of the reason is that it is modeled partly on James Baldwin’s famed The Fire Next Time (1963)—the short first section of Fire is written as a letter to Baldwin’s nephew, Coates’ book as a letter to his son, and Coates uses many signature Baldwin phrases (“my countrymen,” “American innocence,” both on 8). I was then working to finish a book on Baldwin, was a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) These thoughts will focus on what I think is unique about Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, as well as on why I don’t plan to change my long-standing practice of not voting in order to vote for him. I will pay the most attention to Obama’s significance as an African American candidate and to what are for me three defining moments that best put in perspective his approach to race as a political issue and his relation to the U.S. political system. These are his speech on race in Philadelphia, March 18; his response to Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright’s speech on April 28; and his Father’s Day homily, June 15, at Chicago’s Apostolic Church of God.
First, the hype is true: the fact that an African American ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There were fewer than a dozen people at the movie “Stonewall” (2015) when two friends and I saw it on an October Sunday. This implied judgment by potential audiences seems general. The movie earned a modest $113,000 in the week of its release, $61,000 the second week, $12,000 the third, and then fell off the online charts. So what’s the reason for commenting on a movie that is already dead in the water? I think “Stonewall” has important lessons to teach us. Unfortunately, despite some good acting and stirring scenes of the June 1969 Stonewall rebellion and the first Gay Liberation march a year later, most of the lessons point to the wretched choices good people make because of lack of artistic vision and their ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Theses, October 2000, and Discussion
These “theses” were written in October, 2000, shortly after the beginning of the new Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, and were posted on The Utopian website. Along with the theses, we are reprinting a comment by Wayne Price and my response, which were also posted on the site.
Since the theses were written, a good deal has changed. Hundreds more have died. The Barak government in Israel was voted out and a coalition headed by Ariel Sharon took office—strengthening what I see as Sharon’s strategy of blocking agreement on the establishment of a truncated Palestinian state. The Bush Administration in the U.S. backed Israeli positions somewhat more than the Clinton Administration... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It is very difficult to write about the outcome of the Trayvon Martin case. What happened hurts more than anything in years. My most basic thought is simply: that poor boy. And his parents—what they are going through would be unimaginable, except for the long line of Black parents and family before them who have suffered the same way: a son blown away by the police, by vigilantes, by a mob, youths lined up by dealers and executed on outdoor basketball courts, drive-by shootings, little children killed by stray bullets. All this is horrible beyond words and yet for one’s son’s killer to be indicted, tried, and then acquitted adds insult and dishonor—a weighing of the precise importance of a Black person’s life i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In this article I want to expand on some points I made in a brief response to the verdict in the Trayvon Martin trial, printed elsewhere in this issue of The Utopian. I want to argue for two ideas about African Americans’ viewpoint toward the United States. These are based, really, on a fairly long lifetime of thinking politically about this issue, and on experience, although they will be backed up by examples from my scholarly writing and reading. Therefore, I certainly can’t say I am going to “prove” the points I make here, but rather, I want to offer my own sense of this issue for readers to consider.
The first idea is that the great majority of African Americans define themselves as Americans—notwithstandi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) A little over sixty years ago, African Americans faced the question of how to respond to World War II. Most felt there were strong reasons for supporting the war; the question was whether one should concentrate single mindedly on victory, putting aside all other concerns “for the duration,” or should continue to fight for civil rights during the war. After some inevitable initial confusion broad sections of the African American public came round to the second view, despite inconsistent leadership on the national level and opposition by some major leadership groups. This response was a step toward establishing a politically independent African American movement and toward the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) As members of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, we believe there is a need to restate some fundamental positions we hold in common. We have taken this step because some recent opinions stated within Love and Rage backtrack on some of these basic principles. We believe:
Revolutionary anarchism is the program of a self-organized, cooperative, decentralized, and thoroughly democratic society. All social needs will be provided by a network of voluntary, self-managed associations. This means the overthrow of all forms of oppression, including, but not limited to, the domination of the working class, women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, Latinos, youth, neo-colonies, and nature. Self-organization of the people is bo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)