“How come you don’t work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.”
-StudsTerkel
“A friend took this pic in Arizona USA. The meteorologists don’t have a name for it.
(Source: you-are-another-me, via wethinkwedream)
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
-Dylan Thomas
“If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?”
— John Edgar Wideman
To begin at the beginning:
It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and- rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrogered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.
And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before- dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, suckling mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman’s lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread’s bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding though the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
-Dylan Thomas
“The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.”
-May Sarton
Long ago, Plato who was born 427 years before the Nazarene, Plato, that wise man, said: - “All wars arise for the possession of wealth”.
That is as true a word as ever was spoken. For to the present day in all wars the object is to protect or to seize money and property and power; and there will always be wars so long as Capital rules and oppresses the people.
When international capital finds itself threatened by mutual competition, and when the furnace-barons and factory owners begin to have differences among themselves, then they rattle their sabres and spurs and they call out:
“The Country is in danger!” (They mean by “country” always the moneys-bags!)
And wonderfully enough the working slaves of all lands abandon their plough and their anvil, they hasten to arms, and protect the life and property of their masters with their own blood and life. What did I say? “That this is strange?” No, it is quite natural - a natural monstrosity! For it is not the state power and force alone that compels all “subjects” to protect the throne and the money-bags, and to die for them.
Capital has not only economic power in its hands; it has, equal measure and with equal power, subjected the proletariat also intellectually.
This fact is easily overlooked and there still remains, therefore, so much bourgeois ideology in the proletariat!
I, therefore, always say to my brothers, the proletarians, I say to the class-war fighters: - “Free yourselves from bourgeois prejudices!
Fight against capitalism within yourselves! In your thoughts and in your actions there still lurks unspeakably much of the Philistine and the soldier, and almost in every one there is hidden a drilled subaltern, who wishes only to dominate and command, even if it be over his own comrades and over his wife and children in his family!”
But I also say to those bourgeois pacifists, who seek to fight against war by mere hand caresses and tea-cakes and piously up-turned eyes:
“Fight against Capitalism - and you fight against every war!’-
Ernst Friedrich
“One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another. One day it will be realized that Socialism is not the invention of anything new, but the discovery of something actually present, of something that has grown…. We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.”
- Gustav Landauer
