Currently viewing the tag: "Utopianism"
“Listen, Agnes.
I am working-class.
And that really does make a difference. I know what’s useful,
and what isn’t.
I know the price of things,
and I know how to give things up.
I know what it is to struggle -
these tough little lessons
I dont think you people ever learned.
I hold tight, and I do my work.
I make posters for good causes.
Even if they get torn up, I make them, even though we live in a country
where theory falls silent in the face of fact,
where progress can be reversed overnight,
where the enemy has stolen everything, our own words from us,
I hold tight, and not to my painting . . . not only to that.
Pick any era in history, Agnes.
What is really beautiful about that era?
The way the rich lived?
No.
The way the poor lived?
No.
The dreams of the Left
are always beautiful.
The imagining of better world
the damnation of the present one.
This faith,
this luminescent anger,
these alone
are worthy of being called human.
These are the Beautiful
that an age produces.
As an artist I am struck to the heart
by these dreams. These visions.
We progress. But at great cost.
How can anyone stand to live
without understanding that much?”
-Gotchling, a character in Tony Kushner’s play A Bright Room Called Day, set in Weimar Republic (Germany) in the 1930s as country falls to fascism. Tony Kushner is the author of Angels in America.
“If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves, we will evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!”
- James Connolly
“You are the final backstop, you are the final hope for humanity…. You are the final line of defense for unborn generations, for the children of all species. You were born for a reason.” - Van Jones, Power Shift 2009
“Not the crumbs! Not the little pieces around the edges! You have got to name the dream or you’ll never get it!” – Harvey Milk
“Hope is when you look out the window and you go, ‘It doesn’t look good at all, but I’m going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.’” – Anna Deavere Smith
“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” – James Baldwin
“People who do not believe at all in a happy end impede changing the world almost as much as the sweet swindlers, the marriage-swindlers, the charlatans of apotheosis. Unconditional pessimism therefore promotes the business of reaction not much less than artificially conditioned optimism; the latter is nevertheless not so stupid that it does not believe in anything at all. It does not immortalize the trudging of the little life, does not give humanity the face of a chloroformed gravestone. It does not give the world the deathly sad background in front of which it is not worth doing anything at all. In contrast to pessimism which itself belongs to rottenness and may serve it, a tested optimism, when the scales fall from its eyes, does not deny the goal-belief in general; on the contrary, what matters now is to find the right one and to prove it. For this reason there is more possible pleasure in the idea of a converted Nazi than from all the cynics and nihilists. That is why the most dogged enemy of socialism is not only, as is understandable, great capital, but equally the load of indifference and hopelessness; otherwise great capital would stand alone.” – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
“Too much” (therefore superficial and mechanical) political realism often leads to the assertion that a statesman should only work within the limits of “effective reality”; that he should not interest himself in what “ought to be” but only in what “is”. This would mean that he should not look farther than the end of his own nose… But Machiavelli is not merely a scientist: he is a partisan, a man of powerful passions, an active politician, who wishes to create a new balance of forces and therefore cannot help concerning himself with what “ought to be” (not of course in a moralistic sense). Hence the question cannot be posed in these terms, it is more complex. It is one, that is to say, of seeing whether what “ought to be” is arbitrary or necessary;
whether it is concrete will on the one hand or idle fancy, yearning, daydream on the other. The active politician is a creator, an initiator; but he neither creates from nothing nor does he move in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams. He bases himself on effective reality, but what is this effective reality? Is it something static and immobile, or is it not rather a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium? If one applies one’s will to the creation of a new equilibrium among the forces which really exist and are operative—basing oneself on the particular force which one believes to be progressive and strengthening it to help it to victory—one still moves on the terrain of effective reality, but does so in order to dominate and transcend it (or to contribute to this). What “ought to be” is therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics.” – Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince
Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks can be downloaded from Diary of a Walking Butterfly HERE for educational purposes.
For those interested in reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, note that Joseph Buttigieg’s translation of Volumes 1-3, Notebooks 1-8 of 30, of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were just released in a 3-volume paperback set. You can buy it through Amazon.com for $60 (down from $60 per volume for the hardcover copies). Socialists everywhere should read Antonio Gramsci!
With the warmest regard for the labour, courage, and memory of Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, without whose efforts to preserve Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks past both Mussolini and Stalin’s censors, at great threat to herself, we would have lost a great communist corpus.
by Ernst Bloch
“Mildness and “The Light of His Fury” (William Blake)” from Atheism in Christianity (1972).
“Some men are born lambs… to them Jesus did not preach with the power the Scripture speaks of. And least of all is he himself the mild figure some meek spirits make out. The future the wolves have dressed for the sheep, so that their wolfishness may become twofold. The pseudo-shepherd is portrayed as so quiet, so infinitely patient, that one might think he really was like that. The founder figure must have been free from passions . . . Yet Jesus had one of the strongest passions there are: anger. He overthrew the tables of the money-changers in the Temple, and did not forget to use a whip. He is only patient in the affairs of his own quiet circle; he shows no love at all for its enemies. So far as the Sermon on the Mount is concerned it does not, it is true, speak of one man being set against another for the love of Christ, as do some zealous words (Matt. 10. 35 f.); but then it is not a sermon about days of battle at all. With its blessing on the meek and the peacemakers, it is concerned with the last days: with the End, which Jesus (according to the Mandaean John) thought close at hand. Hence its immediate, chiliastic references to the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5. 3). There is quite a different message for the battle, for the achievement of the Kingdom: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10. 34); or, in more outward-looking, outward-burning terms: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk. 12. 49). Which is exactly what William Blake meant by his corollary in verse, applicable to 1789, “The spirit of turmoil shot down from the Saviour/ And in the vineyards of red France appear’d the light of his fury.”
“The sword in Jesus, preaching, and the fire which purifies as well as destroys, are certainly directed at more than mere palaces: they apply to the whole of the old aeon, which must pass away. But at the lead of the list stand the enemies of those who labor and are heavy laden: the rich, for whom it is more difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is (with all the irony of the impossible) for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The Church has widened that aperture considerably since, and her Jesus has of course now left the focal point of mutiny. Mildness – to the unjust, that is – has come up trumps, not Jesus’ anger. And yet even Kautsky, who only say in it a “minor religious mantle,” had to admit in his Foundations of Christianity that “The class hatred of the modern proletariat has scarcely ever reached such fanatical forms as that of the Christian proletariat.” Jesus would spew the lukewarm out of his mouth; no single word of his can fit ideologically into any of the social structures we have so far known – least of all the words of Sermon on the Mount. Everything he said is full of expectation, and preparation for the End. His moral teaching is incomprehensible without its apocalyptic counterpart – even prescinding from the (very late) Revelation of John, which, though not confined to Jesus’ doctrine, was continually hinted at in his preaching.
“‘He who endures to the end will be saved’ (Mk. 13. 13): a strict complement indeed to the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. “And what I say to you I say to all: Watch” (Mk. 13. 37). There is no quietism there; rather, in the words of William Blake, these sayings relate to the light of that undeniable fury.”
“When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning!” – Eugene V. Debs, Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act
I figured I’d post another quote from someone who was once charged (and convicted) of sedition. Arundhati Roy and Eugene Debs are exactly that type of “good citizens” that governments like to repress.
“When George Bush says “you’re either with us, or you are with the terrorists” we can say “No thank you.” We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs. Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, if you very listen carefully, you can hear her breathing.”
- Arundhati Roy, “Confronting Empire“, Speech at the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 27 January 2003
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Who is Arundhati Roy?
Arundhati Roy is an extremely talented Indian novelist, essayist, and social justice activist. She has received numerous awards, including the Booker Prize, for her works such as the God of Small Things, as well as for her social justice advocacy. Her most recent work, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshopers, is available from U.S. socialist publisher Haymarket Books.
Socialist Politics:
Recommended Readings
