Alain Badiou on Greece

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3. The fact that this is happening in Greece and not – as ought to be the case – everywhere else in Europe, indicates that the European “Left” has sunk into an irreversible coma. François Hollande? German Social Democracy? Spain’s PSOE? PASOK in Greece? The Labour Party? All these parties are now overtly the managers of globalised capitalism. There is not – there is no longer – a European “Left”. There is a little hope, which is still not very clearly defined, in the wholly new political formations linked to the mass movement against debt and austerity, namely Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. As it happens, Podemos repudiate the distinction between “Left” and “Right”. I do, too. It belongs to the old world of parliamentary politics, which must be destroyed.

7. I continue to think that the hardest ideological blow that could be struck against the current European system is represented by the demand for the complete elimination of Greece’s debt – a speculators’ debt for which the Greek people bears absolutely no responsibility.[…] Europe’s governments – urged on by financial lobbies – want to punish Syriza, punish the Greek people, rather than resolve the debt problem. The best way to punish these punishers themselves would be to default on the debt, whatever the risks that this would entail. Argentina did it a few years ago, and it isn’t dead – far from it.
10. But whatever comes of this outside help, the situation in Greece will be resolved by the Greeks themselves. The principle of the primacy of internal factors applies to this situation, too. Now, the risks are all the more considerable in that Syriza is only formally in power. We know – we can feel it – that already the old political forces are engaged in intrigues behind the scenes. Even beyond the fact that state power very rapidly corrupts, when it is acquired in regular and non-revolutionary conditions, we could obviously pose some classic questions: is Syriza in complete control of the police, the army, the justice system, the economic and financial oligarchy? Certainly not. The internal enemy still exists, it remains almost intact, it is still powerful, and it enjoys the support in the shadows of Syriza’s foreign enemies, including the European bureaucracy and the reactionary governments. The popular movement and its grassroots organisations must keep a constant watch over the government’s actions. To repeat – the “No” in the referendum will only be a true force when it continues into very powerful independent movements.

11. International popular support – a ceaseless one, one that demonstrates, one that catches the media’s attention – must devote all its forces to Greece’s possible call for Mobilization. >

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Sleepwalkers of the American Hologram

There are far far too many people–of the people who count–who don’t feel that uncomfortable or oppressed–overworked and in debt though they may be (debt, after all, is American Wealth… until you max the last credit card, you got cash, and cash what matters)–who don’t see, want to see, refuse to see, those who are clinging to the edge, or already long in free fall–or worse, see the plight of those unfortunates as their saving grace, as deserving what they get, as threats to their own precarious, delusional security, when the reality is, every one of those unfortunates got hold the heel or pant leg of the oblivious We Okay Don’t Rock this Leaky Boat majority… if it is a majority, which you might think by walking down Walnut in Center City on any weekday, or 2nd Street after dark on a weekend, or watching the traffic jam up crossing Ben Franklin –all those happy people heading down the shore on a Friday evening.

The late Joe Bageant was right. Called it the American Hologram. Where those people–the ones who count–I mean, the one’s we supposed to believe are the Real America–where they live. In that bubble.
I’m not talkin the filthy rich, the 1%, the .001%. They think they count. And for now, as long as the Bubble People believe them, they do. Naw, don’t mean them. I mean those in the Bubble. The Oligarchs–the filthy rich corporate assholes who think they are in control–they know that. Why they work so hard to control the press, to jack up and maintain the hysterical addiction to consumption, they work them to exhaustion and entertain them to near brain death. Cause they have this righteous fear, maybe some even glimpsing the truth–that no one is in control. It’s all on mindless auto-pilot. They jerk on the levers and pull the switches and the lights flash on and off–but it’s all a show. The machine is self-perpetuating, self-repairing…. as long as those people who it really
depends on, the one’s who actually make everything work, even while the assholes suck the rewards of their labor out of their pockets and bank accounts their paychecks.

Why the political servants of the assholes talk about ‘saving the middle class,’ even while they don’t give a flying fuck about saving the middle class, except that’s the only way they think they can keep the Big Machine running. The Middle Class are that machines Soylent Green.

No election is going to change that. Elections are the Ambien of the Sleepwalker in the American Hologram. There is no democracy. There is only this endlessly repeated burlesque show. Those who have been pushed outside the bubble, who have been refused entrance, who have fallen though the cracks–consciousness at least is theirs, and with them–not in any damn President, lies the hope that a great awakening may yet come.
May it happen. May it happen soon. May all those who are not themselves asleep, work to make it so. And if we are outside the bubble–may we resist with all the power of truth, the temptation of
Assimilation. It is our very exile that is our salvation

from The Margins: “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show”

Ken Chen’s, essay.

I read this, at first, racing through out of excietment for what I was finding… but had to stop. To begin again, more slowly. Some–much of this was painful, in a multiplicity of ways–where do I come from, afterall, if not from the colonizers? It took me almost two hours. I need to read this again.

JUNE 11, 2015 | AVANT-GARDE, CONCEPTUAL POETRY, KENNETH GOLDSMITH, POETRY, RACISM, VANESSA PLACE

From Whitman to Ferlingetti, a word to the Defenders of the Indefensible

When an artist’s ‘flaws’ are more than personal, but go to the very heart of the social and political miliue that we support with every penny we spend, we get no pass to excuse the person because of “the times,” or because their faults are endemic to the system. Doing so is but a way to excuse ourselves from our own complicity, and from making action to overthrow and replace this racist, misogistist empire of money and death, the centerpiece of our lives and our art.

A response to CA Conrad’s Harriet Essay on Whitman

CA Conrad wrote an important essay on Harriet. One that no one should ignore, or dismiss, or shy away from because it offends. It has pushed my own thinking on art, poetry, revolution, and I would ask that anyone reading this… take a deep breath, step back, and let it work on you—in the context of our received notions of where we have come from.

I have always thought that the strongest works of the imagination were more and other than the intentions of their makers, or of the interpretative constraints of their times. I haven’t changed those beliefs. But Conrad’s challenge is not about that. Defenses of Whitman—that he was a man of his times, that he wrote equally strong passages sympathetic to slaves (if not of native peoples)—are beside the point. What I heard in his essay was an echo of something that has been on my mind for some time.

We want to ignore, or explain away, the complicity of our cultural heritage—I mean, white, Euro-American art, poetry, music, theater, how it has served, directly and indirectly, the Masters of our history. And their wars, their slave holding, their misogyny—kings and empire, and after, the economic empires of colonizing capitalism.

It isn’t enough … or maybe, it’s not yet time, to save what has been passed down, what we (as artists… of all forms), are meant to follow, to renew, to challenge even as we stand on the shoulders of those who we must acknowledge—that we are their heirs. But what, and how much, of what they have left us?

The analogy that comes to mind… the German children and grandchildren of the Nazis. We are the children and grandchildren—and more than that, the brothers and sisters of genocide, of this whole monstrous empire of money and death, and what we have been given—our aesthetic heritage– to build on—is infected beyond our… if not, of future generations… ability to purge and cleanse.

We cannot cannot cannot build a new world, and nothing less will do if we as a species—if life on this planet is to survive– than to build a new world, and we cannot do that but on the ashes and ruins of the old.

This is Conrad’s hard truth.

There may come a time when we will be able to look back, read Whitman for what even he had no inkling of what was there, to find and celebrate again that lightning of imaginative truth, the light of which illuminates the truth neither person nor historical time were able to see. I do not despair of the power of imagination—that whatever come forth from that sublime flash, will endure, and be worthy of our appreciation generation to generation. Whitman, too.

But we are not in that place where we can rescue what flashed through him—not before we are ready to confront the truth of the contamination of Empire and the myth of race and the destiny of State.

I stand with you, Conrad. For your courage, and your truth.

And hope for the day, when we have remade this world—when we will again be able to recite Whitman… and all our failed poets, artists… as we may be remembered… for all our failings.

Tell us, Chris Hedges, What will be the course of this Revolution?

Chris Hedges on Salon

Question is… can we do the revolution, like digging under the foundation, and as the Empire collapses, a little here, a little there, replace it with what we’ve been working to build together, like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, plank by plank–and at last, transformed into something unimaginable until it emerges, whole and free of the empire of money and death that had engendered it? Or must it come from a bloodbath, where force will replace force, and the boot of Authority emerge, unchanged, but with new names, and new victims, and our new masters?

Which will it be? And do we even have a choice?

Memorial Day, Gil Johnson

They Uphold and Protect Our Freedom.
They are Heroes.
Happy Memorial Day.
In which we memorialize the living and the dead alike.
There’s little distinction between our collective national commendation and extolling on one hand of Armed People abroad and our excoriation and indifference towards them at home on our other hand. Both treatments live in our use of that little word Hero. Our Armed People are Heroes more than we, because, in our stories, they have gone out into the world, and encountered death, and returned changed. That change real or imagined is tragic in a personal sense, because in this story where they are Heroes, they are no longer of us. We can extoll them but we can’t understand them.
As tragic, more tragic, differently tragic, is the source in our souls of this ongoing personal need to sacrifice our children to Heroism: we feel enslaved, perceive ourselves as inescapably burdened. The common cycle of economic debt is embraced by a people who have come to view themselves as indebted to the larger society for their very existence: if we are to be so much as fed, clothed, loved, we must EARN it, and this might be a positive value if the earning were possible. But nothing is asked of us, other than to competitively succeed over our brothers, and nothing is given to us but with the demand that we do what is asked of us.
We have no freedom to search, abroad or in ourselves, for the witches, the talking animals, for the Ogres of Death which would grind our bones to a heroic rebirth. We must Work.
Enter the Armed People, who accept a higher call. Who march as god’s own soldiers, armored with our Ideology, who march right out of our lives onto the pages of Grimm’s Be All You Can Be commercials. Once gone from our sight, they embody the freedom and action and triumph of will, the Puritan Strength of our ancestors courses through them, and through them we revolt in our spirits against the Oppressors and Evils of the world, and through them we are made Free.
And if they return? How should we meet their eyes?
If they have done all our hearts have demanded, their eyes will shame us with knowledge and strength we were too timid to embrace. They were never really like us at all, or they would not have left, or we would have gone too.
If they meet our eyes as equals, more horrible. Did they fail? Were they undeserving? Was there never really a chance, no higher thing for them to find or become? Did we risk them for nothing? Did we cower at home from nothing?
Better they should not return.
No wonder we most revere the dead.
The Ultimate Sacrifice.
Our Ultimate Sacrifice.
May the smoke of our offerings please them in Heaven.

What’s JAIL SUPPORT & Why is it important?

Jail Support is both tracking – finding out where people who were arrested were taken, calling to check in on their commissioner’s hearing and arraignment (when they get charged/see if they need bail) – and being outside the jail/booking to provide comfort to friends and community members who have been arrested when they get released. It is a way of showing solidarity & support to people who have been arrested and a way of taking care of friends and community. Jail support is important to decrease the effects of the dehumanization and isolation of jail and reminds people that they are not alone in this struggle. It’s important that we help each other navigate the overwhelming process of arrest, jail, legal counsel access, and follow up court hearings. And it’s important to come out of those cells to friends, nourishment, and support.
Things to bring with you: water, food, snacks, smokes, cameras (to document injuries), caffeine (tea or coffee for people doing night shifts), change/dollars for transportation home, warm things if weather is cold – blankets, scarves, extra hoodies/sweaters, and LOTS of water if the weather is hot.

Shifts : going with 1 -2 or more other people and planning to stay for a few hours at a time allows us to make sure there is always a crew of people there when anyone is released but also allows people who have been doing jail support for a long time to take breaks. Go in shifts & set these up as soon as arrests start or before if possible. 3- 5 hours per shift/crew or whatever you can do lets other people go get rest, eat some food, take care of their pets, kids, etc. Jail support should be a bonding and motivating experience – not burn us out!

Jail support can be done by ANYONE! … and should be done by EVERYONE if you are physically/mentally able. You don’t need a legal degree or legal experience to support people coming out of jail. Jail support is definitely political & personal but it’s not the same as the protest/action that brought you there. The way jail support crew behaves and how they interact with law enforcement outside the jails/booking/precincts can affect how long they hold our crew. Don’t talk about any actions/events/behaviors leading up to or associated to peoples arrests.
We don’t want to do the state’s job for them – anything you say, regardless of context, can be used against you/friends/others.

When your friends/crew/family get released – YAY!! : It is always best if partners, family and/or friends can be present when people are getting released. They will know them best, know what foods they like, know the best ways to comfort them, hopefully have an extra set of house keys, etc. If you don’t know someone personally try to take cues from them on what kind of support they would like. Coming out of jail can be overwhelming so respect their boundaries when offering support.
Not everyone wants a hug, so ask first.
Make sure to take care of their basic needs first. Do they need water? Food? A phone to call a loved one? If they were injured, with their consent, have someone take pictures of their injuries & document what happened to them. Once these basic human needs are met help them write down important information for follow up legal/court support:
(1) legal name, (2) charges, (3) court return date, (4) contact info- either phone or email (5) date, time, and location of arrest. Make sure the legal team/Up Against the Law gets all this info for continued follow up court support.

If you are arrested and are not a citizen do not share that information with anyone except your attorney. Strongly urge anyone who has been arrested NOT to talk about the details of what they were or were not doing leading up to the arrest.

What would a Free University look like?

Years ago I lived in a communal house. Expenses were divided proportional to income. For those willing to to do this, a house or loft space with 6 to 8 people (more would be better), would free people with those academic skills our late zombie capitalism continues to marganialize (the better to control and confine what is taught to ‘productive’ job training)– to teach and mentor, especially in the arts (the most inclusive definition of what that means) as alternatives to preditory graduate programs designed as institutional income generators.

We need to seriously think about, plan and experiment with education outside the academy– for all the humanities, creating non-hiarchal, student participatory teaching models and measures of competence as alternatives to grades and degrees, not modeled on existing institutions, but freely drawing on their rescources, becomeing predatory parasites of the predatorys at the top of the educational food chain.

This is not a utopian idea–this is what MUST be done if education in other than science and business is to survive outside the jaws of our corporate masters into the rest of this century. Whatever the personal sacrifices requiered (which more and more, means giving up nothing but the illusion of tenure and financial security), this is the cost of creative and intellectual freedom. It’s time and past tiime to renew the idea of the “free university,” not one modeled on existing institutions, but as decribed here–aa living cooperative communities. It’s time and past tiime to renew the idea of the “free university,” not one modeled on existing institutions, but as decribed here–aa living cooperative communities.

Baltimore. May Day, 2015

The march over–some 10,000 or more winding their way though the streets and neighborhoods, down to the Inner Harbor, up to City Hall. After the speeches, after all but a hundred or so had left, electing to face arrest when curfew had passed. The Helicopters, floodlights, robocop voices “GO HOME… GO HOME”… but where is home in a country where this happens? Continue reading “Baltimore. May Day, 2015” →