Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

”I remember a young anarchist immigrant, Francisco from Spain, imprisoned as so many were in those years after World War II, for being in America without papers. Later he was deported to Franco’s Spain, where he was quickly killed. While he was in prison in New York, the authorities, having found out that Francisco was a baker by trade, tried to set him to work in the kitchen. Francisco staged a one-man sit-down strike. ‘I will do nothing,’ he said in his thickly accented English, ‘to support this house.’ It was what we all felt — it became a rallying cry. And remained so long after he was no more.

I will do nothing to support this house. Not ours the wars, the cruelty, the murder, the oppression. Not ours the men and women in madhouses, lobotomized, terrorized, shocked or drugged to death. Not ours the politics of the witch hunt: the Rosenbergs, Wilhelm Reich, long gone Sacco and Vanzetti. Not ours the hideous, heavy furniture even… The sliding glass doors looking out on decorous gardens… Not ours, the women kept home, locked out of sight.”


— Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman

URL: http://tmblr.co/ZIuWlugWgPe9

[American Dream]

questions for poets (7)


how important is your household? is your reproduction? is your not reproduction? is why you can’t reproduce? is why you won’t/ is who you love or how? is your refusal of love? is how you eat? is who you eat with? is how you won’t eat? is how you eat too much? is where your food? is what is your food? of what class is your food? of what class is your sex? have you read that line I wrote about how all sex is sex work but the sex of kings? have you said to me “I’ve only had the sex of kings”? how did you say this? how do you feel? how important is your sex or not sex? is your money? is your trust fund? is your million dollars? is your half million dollars? is her fifteen dollars left? is where you got your money? do you have investments? do you have property? is your work? is your not getting work? is you having too much work? is your cleaning? is who cleans for you? do you have someone who cleans for you? do you have someone who makes food for you? do you have someone who cares for your children? are these women? do they work for you for love? do they suffer you for love? are they a wife? do you have a wife? is women? and what does your wife do? how do you call a person a wife? do you call yourself a wife? do they work for you for money? do they sex for you for money? do you sex for money? do you sex for money indirectly? do you work? do you clean for another? do you care for the children of another? do you make food for another? is this a choice? how do you choice? do you like to make this food? have you had to find pleasure? have you sought hard for pleasure? have you taken medicine? how can you be a husband? who can “judicious control of resources”? who can patriarch? who can want? is there lifestyle? what is lifestyle? does your life have lifestyle? do you have a life without lifestyle? how? may I show you my life without lifestyle? may I show you? will you block? must you bar me? must I love you? what have you done? how many people have you sexed for? how many meals have you made? how many apolitical political tasks? how have you taken care of those who hate you? how have you taken care? how many obscurings? how many situations? how many erudite conversations? how many explicit exclusions? how many institutional powers? when have you been property? how many legitimizing offices? how many easy days? how many exclusions merely suggested? how many threats of death? how many households have you lived in? what perils? in what ways have you been hated? how many loves?



URL: http://tmblr.co/ZIuWluY9S_yc

[American Dream]

http://nativeskins.tumblr.com/post/1652 ... erocity-in



Crazy Horse - Tashunca-uitco

Celebrated for his ferocity in battle, Crazy Horse was recognized among his own people as a visionary leader committed to preserving the traditions and values of the Lakota way of life.

Even as a young man, Crazy Horse was a legendary warrior. He stole horses from the Crow Indians before he was thirteen, and led his first war party before turning twenty. Crazy Horse fought in the 1865-68 war led by the Oglala chief Red Cloud against American settlers in Wyoming, and played a key role in destroying William J. Fetterman’s brigade at Fort Phil Kearny in 1867.

Crazy Horse earned his reputation among the Lakota not only by his skill and daring in battle but also by his fierce determination to preserve his people’s traditional way of life. He refused, for example, to allow any photographs to be taken of him. And he fought to prevent American encroachment on Lakota lands following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, helping to attack a surveying party sent into the Black Hills by General George Armstrong Custer in 1873.

When the War Department ordered all Lakota bands onto their reservations in 1876, Crazy Horse became a leader of the resistance. Closely allied to the Cheyenne through his first marriage to a Cheyenne woman, he gathered a force of 1,200 Oglala and Cheyenne at his village and turned back General George Crook on June 17, 1876, as Crook tried to advance up Rosebud Creek toward Sitting Bull’s encampment on the Little Bighorn.

After this victory, Crazy Horse joined forces with Sitting Bull and on June 25 led his band in the counterattack that destroyed Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, flanking the Americans from the north and west as Hunkpapa warriors led by chief Gall charged from the south and east.

Following the Lakota victory at the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull and Gall retreated to Canada, but Crazy Horse remained to battle General Nelson Miles as he pursued the Lakota and their allies relentlessly throughout the winter of 1876-77. This constant military harassment and the decline of the buffalo population eventually forced Crazy Horse to surrender on May 6, 1877; except for Gall and Sitting Bull, he was the last important chief to yield.

Even in defeat, Crazy Horse remained an independent spirit, and in September 1877, when he left the reservation without authorization, to take his sick wife to her parents, General George Crook ordered him arrested, fearing that he was plotting a return to battle. Crazy Horse did not resist arrest at first, but when he realized that he was being led to a guardhouse, he began to struggle, and while his arms were held by one of the arresting officers, a soldier ran him through with a bayonet.

[American Dream]

What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no, not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself. We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

- Barbara Ehrenreich

[American Dream]

#greencapitalismkills by Stephanie McMillan

[American Dream]

Elmina Blues by Carl Hancock Rux

[American Dream]

This month...marked the release of the new book, entitled Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz (PM Press), co-edited by Fred Ho and Quincy Saul, with a foreword by Chuck D. The collected essays examine a wide range of topics that are perhaps most striking for their honest self-criticism and for his commitment to confronting male supremacy and misogyny in all its forms. For example, in one essay entitled, “The Question of Violence,” after Maroon criticizes “the worldwide misogynist ‘gangsta’ genre of the hip hop culture” for being “a male, macho parody of exhibitionist violence,” Maroon writes:


“More troubling is the fact that this male exhibitionist violence has also permeated the minds, practices, and circles of otherwise brilliant and well-meaning revolutionary thinkers. Such theorists as the renowned Frantz Fanon, icons like Malcolm X and Kwane Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and others have unconsciously conflated the necessary utilization of defensive revolutionary violence, in seeking meaningful revolutionary socioeconomic and cultural change, with what they believed was a need for males to use ‘revolutionary violence’ to also ‘liberate their minds and spirits’ from the subservience imposed on them by the vestiges of slavery and the colonialism /neocolonialism of their times. These individuals failed to recognize that their ‘revolutionary’ worldview would still leave in place the entire male-supremacist /patriarchal framework, an edifice that we can term the ‘father of oppression.’ The destruction of this edifice will signal the true liberation they sought. Otherwise, the ‘revolutionary violence’ they formulated must also be recognized for what it is: exhibitionist, ego-based male violence.”


Read the whole article at: http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2013/04 ... st-be.html

[American Dream]

http://www.justseeds.org/roger_peet/06laborwealth.html

Roger Peet

Labor Creates All Wealth

3-color screenprint

Here's a slogan that resonates fuzzily from the bygone days of industrial unionism, repurposed for a broader context. "Labor creates all wealth, therefore all wealth must go to labor" is something usually attributed to Marx, or more properly perhaps to Engels, his co-pamphleteer. It's difficult to find the exact quote, leading one to imagine an apocryphal quality to it. At any rate, if you take it literally, it leads your gaze away from the industrial machine, cranking out gewgaws and technics and lifestyles, and towards the labor on which this whole enterprise rests: the labor of insects. Without the daily hum and thrum of the pollinators (not to mention the decomposers, the pulpers, and the predators), there would be nothing for us to squabble over, no cotton for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, no indigo for the police uniforms, no hickory staves for the unions to block the truncheon blows with, no sweet nectar of any sort anywhere at all. And as the bees disappear from us, along with the rest of nature, we will eventually awaken from our drunken raging stupor to find ourselves perched atop a ladder, unbalanced, out alone in the tall grass with nowhere to rest against and nothing holding us up. The only choice remaining to us will be which way to fall.


This is a print from "Uprisings", our installation in Milwaukee in March 2013. It is entirely handmade, films cut from rubylith and inked on cotton vellum, printed cooperatively on recycled Mr. French paper.

[American Dream]

Long hair is Communism

[American Dream]

http://www.justseeds.org/celebrate_peop ... roons.html

Celebrate People's History

Damon Locks
Jamaican Maroons
$4

In the early 1700s, Queen Nanny and the Windward Maroons used guerilla warfare to defeat the British from the mountains of Jamaica. In doing so, they avoided further enslavement and forced the British to capitulate. In 1939-40, the British Governor in Jamaica gave the Maroons two thousand five hundred acres and they were able to live under their own governance.

[American Dream]

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

“Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them’; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of ‘welfare recipients.’ They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a “good, organized, and just” society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these ‘incompetent and lazy’ folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be ‘integrated,’ ‘incorporated’ into the healthy society that they have ‘forsaken.’

“The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not ‘marginals,’ are not people living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’—inside the structure which made them ‘beings for others.’ The solution is not to ‘integrate’ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves.’ Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientização.”

"The fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other… Theirs is a fundamental role, and has been throughout the history of this struggle. It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly, these adherents to the people’s cause constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust."

[American Dream]

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle

http://untorellipress.noblogs.org/post/ ... -struggle/

We present a compilation of historical documents, interviews, and critical analyses of STAR, a group of street queens in early 70s New York City who self-organized for survival and revolt. Contained within are pamphlets distributed by STAR, as well as interviews with and speeches by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Additionally, we are excited to include a critical essay by Ehn Nothing on STAR’s legacy, the enemies of queer insurrection, and the war against gender.

[Hammer of Los]

...

Long hair is Communism

Almost cut my hair.

Happened just the other day.

It was gettin' kinda long.

I coulda said it was gettin' in my way.

I love the banner;

STOP
HIPPIES

MARCH OF
THE
ANTICHRIST

...

[American Dream]

...

Long hair is Communism

Almost cut my hair.

Happened just the other day.

It was gettin' kinda long.

I coulda said it was gettin' in my way.

I love the banner;

STOP
HIPPIES

MARCH OF
THE
ANTICHRIST

...

Thanks for commenting on this, Hol- you inspired me to pay more attention to the photo- which looks eerily similar to this photo (which I believe to be the real one), wherein protesters in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1959 declared that “race mixing” (aka school integration) was “communism”:




Thank you for helping expose a new tumblr/Facebook hoax meme!

[American Dream]

“Biko” by Jesus Barraza

http://melaniecervantes.tumblr.com/post ... -my-office