[quotes] The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity - David Graeber and David Wengrow 2021

 

"The political implications of the Hobbesian model need little elaboration. It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or cooperation; in which case, the best we can hope for are more sophisticated internal and external controls on our supposedly innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement."

"Rousseau's story about how humankind descended into inequality form an original state of egalitarian innocence seems more optimistic, but nowadays it's mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering."

"For obvious reasons, Hobbes's position tends to be favoured by those on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau's by those leaning left."

"The first thing to emphasize is that 'the origin of social inequality' is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchy were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve."

"The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human - that is, what rights could they be said to have 'naturally,' even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws?"

"[Native] Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit. The democratic governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed later European readers, was an expression of the same principle: if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus."

"In conclusion, [Kandiaronk] swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest."

"[from Turgot:] We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex 'commercial civilization', in which the poverty and dispossession of some - however lamentable it may be - is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole."

"How is it that Europeans are able to turn wealth into power; turn a mere unequal distribution of material goods - which exists, at least to some degree, in any society - into the ability to tell others what to do, to employ them as servants, workmen, or grenadiers, or simply to feel that it was no concern of theirs if they were left dying in a feverish bundle on the street?"

"To Americans like Kandiaronk, there was no contradiction between individual liberty and communism - that's to say, communism in the sense we've been using it here, as a certain presumption of sharing, that people who aren't actual enemies can be expected to respond to one another's needs. In the American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of 'baseline communism', since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive."

"The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property [...] there was a strong emphasis on ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one's direct control)."

"while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way."

"When we are capable of self-awareness, it's usually for very brief periods of time: the 'window of consciousness', during which we can hold a through or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we're talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end."

"There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them... It's often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often to serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs."

"If there is a riddle here it's this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens - supposedly the wisest of apes - allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root?"

"What are the mechanisms that cause human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbors?"

"the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all."

"American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like - provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors - unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or 'egalitarian people such as Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid - what contemporary European observers often referred to as 'communism' - was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy."

"As St Augustine put it, we rebelled against God, and God's judgment was to cause our own desires to rebel against our rational good sense; our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires."

"In working the land, one 'mixes one's labour' with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke's disciples, didn't do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, 'improving landlords' but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum effort. James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and 'if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or 'destroyed' like savage beasts.' In a similar way, the stereotype of the carefree, lazy native, coasting through a life free from material ambition, was deployed by thousands of European conquerors, plantation overseers and colonial officials in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania as a pretext for the use of bureaucratic terror to force local people into work: everything form outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvee labour and debt peonage."

"To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that - quite unlike free societies - we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C.B. Macperson meant by 'possessive individualism'. Just as every man's home is his castle, so your right not be killed, tortured, or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on."

"What makes the Roman Law conception of property - the basis of almost all legal systems today - unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will."

"Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment, turning one's wealth into an engine for creating ever more wealth, increasing production, expanding operations, and so forth. But imagine, Weber suggested, being the very first person in one's community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours - who would, increasingly, also become your employees."

"Salmon-fishing and acorn-gathering simply have very different practical affordances, which over the long term might be expected to produce very different sorts of societies: one warlike and prone to raiding (and after you have made off with the food, it's not much of a leap to begin carrying off prisoners as well), the other essentially peaceful. Northwest societies, then, were warlike because they simply didn't have the option of relying on a war-proof staple food."

"We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live. Revealingly, the arguments appear to have been most intense precisely in this border zone between anthropological 'culture areas'."

"Perhaps Marx put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing."

"Theirs [the Neolithic] was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase, the likelihood, of securing a favourable outcome. Their 'laboratory' was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation. This Neolithic mode of cultivation, was, moreover, highly successful."

"The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return."

"there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighborhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of time, in our heads. Much of social theory can be seen as an attempt to square these two dimensions of our experience."

"households cannot simply schedule their daily labour in line with their own needs. They also have to consider their obligations to other households, which in turn have their own obligations to other, different households, and so on. Factoring in that some tasks - such as moving flocks to highland pastures, or the demands of milking, shearing and guarding herds - may require the combined efforts of ten different households, and that households have to balance the scheduling of numerous different sorts of commitment, we begin to get a sense of the complexities involved."

"Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains."

"perhaps the first to attempt a systematic definition was a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late nineteenth century, proposed that a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory... On this definition, a government is a 'state' if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; or, as von Ihering emphasized, that can decide who else has the right to do so on its behalf."

"We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey; the freedom to reorganize social relations. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination?"

"As we've seen, this obsession with property rights as the basis of society, and a foundation of social power, is a peculiarly Western phenomenon - indeed, if 'the West' has any real meaning, it would probably refer to that legal and intellectual tradition which conceives society in those terms."

"In other words, 'landed property' is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state's monopoly of violence within a territory."

"We would like to suggest that these three principles - call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma - are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree."

"What really concerns us about these three principles is that each has become the basis for institutions now seen as foundational to the modern state. In the case of control over violence, this is obvious. Modern states are 'sovereign': they hold the power once held by kings, which in practice translates to von Ihering's monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within their territory... In modern states, the very same kind of power is multiplied a thousand times because it is combined with the second principle: bureaucracy... administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on 'official secrets' of one sort or another... the danger, is offset by a third principle: democracy. Modern states are democratic, or at least it's generally felt that they should be."

"People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power."

"When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a 'patrimonial system': that is, one in which all the kings' subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king."

"Families who found themselves unable to command such resources had to obtain beer and loaves elsewhere, creating networks of obligation and debt. Hence important class distinctions and dependencies did, in fact, begin to emerge, as a sizeable sector of Egypt's population found itself deprived of the means to care independently for ancestors."

"Indeed, if we are trying to understand the appeal of monarchy as a form of government - and it cannot be denied that for much of recorded human history it was a very popular one - then likely it has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time."

"Between households, responsibilities came down to a principle of reciprocity: records were kept and at the end of each year all outstanding credits and debts were to be cancelled out. This is where the 'village bureaucracy' comes in. To do that meant units of work had to be measured in a way which allowed clear resolution to the inevitable arguments that crop up in such situations - about who did what for whom, and who owed what to whom... Of course, the danger of such accounting procedures is that they can be turned to other purposes: the precise system of equivalence that underlies them has the potential to give almost any social arrangements, even those founded on arbitrary violence, an air of even-handedness and equity."

"Both money and administration are based on similar principles of impersonal equivalence. What we wish to emphasize at this point is how frequently the most violence inequalities seem to arise, in the first instance, from such fictions of legal equality. All citizens of a city, or all worshippers of its god, or all subjects of its king were considered ultimately the same - at least in that one specific way. The same laws, the same rights, the same responsibilities applied to all of them, whether as individual or, in later and more patriarchal times, as families under the aegis of paterfamilias."

"What's important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, and their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects' unique situations. This is what gives the word 'bureaucracy' such a distasteful association almost everywhere today."

"[we noted] how the English word 'free' ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning 'friend' - since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, [the freedom to create or transform social relationships...] One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom, or permanent slavery? It happens, we'd suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable - in a nutshell, bureaucratized."

"As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence."

"Jaspers called this the Axial Age, a term since expanded by others to include the period that saw the birth of all today's world religions, stretching from the Persian prophet Zoroaster (c.800BC) to the coming of Islam (c.AD 600)."

"As a result, the social sciences were conceived and organized around two core questions: (1) waht had gone wrong with the project of Enlightenment, with the unity of scientific and moral progress, and with schemes for the improvement of human society? And: (2) why is is that well-meaning attempts to fix society's problems so often end up making things even worse?"

"The British Empire, for instance, maintained a system of indirect rule in various parts of Africa, India, and the Middle East where local institutions like royal courts, earth shrines, associations of clan elders, men's houses and the like were maintained in place, indeed fixed by legislation. Major political change - forming a political party, say, or leading a prophetic movement - was in turn entirely illegal, and anyone who tried to do such things was likely to be put in prison. This obviously made it easier to describe the people anthropologists studied as having a way of life that was timeless and unchanging."

"Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control. Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting 'real' scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming, as outside the scope of social theory entirely."

"If something did go terribly wrong in human history - and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did - then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history."

"The Roman Law conception of natural freedom is essentially based on the power of the individual (by implication, a male head of household) to dispose of his property as he sees fit. In Roman Law property isn't even exactly a right, since rights are negotiated with others and involve mutual obligations; it's simply power - the blunt reality that someone in possession of a thing can do anything he wants with it, except that which is limited 'by force or law'.

"Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more 'complex' the system needed to keep it organized. Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains or command, which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decide to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom - to refuse orders - and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don't do as they're told. As we've seen, none of these assumptions are theoretically essential, and history tends not to bear them out."

[quotes] They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom - Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri 2022

 

"Revolution, they believed, required first and foremost a level of consciousness, not just strategies for fighting or protesting. They raised people's consciousness through holding teach-ins and putting on cultural events."

"'if you uproot an olive tree, we'll plant one hundred instead!'"

"If I was successful in life but my success didn't help Palestine, then it wasn't truly a success. They planted this seed in us while we were very young, but even if they didn't, everything I had witnessed from a young age would have been enough to make the liberation of Palestine the main goal of my life."

"While I believe that it's the right of all colonized, occupied, and oppressed people to stand up to their oppressors, I've always been convinced that staying alive and conveying our message through unarmed resistance is more powerful and strategic than our dying. I can't serve the Palestinian cause if I'm dead."

"'Thank you for your tears,' I began. 'But I don't want your sadness. Nor do I want your money. Please save that for the people in your own country who need it."

"The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States was one of the worst things to happen to the Palestinian people in recent years."

"'I want to teach you all a course on international law and international humanitarian law, so you truly benefit from your time here by learning your rights and expanding your political consciousness.'"

"My time in her classroom is one of the many reasons I've never viewed this chapter of my life as a loss. In prison, I learned the virtue of patience, something I had always struggled with before. And in prison, instead of putting my own comfort and desires first, I learned how to be in a group and always fight for the interest of the collective."

"By their examples, Khalida and Khalto Yasmeen had taught me how to be a strong woman who advocated for herself and spoke truth to power. They had helped me understand the critical role women play in our society and in our struggle for liberation. Women make up half of society, and they raise the whole of it."

[quotes] How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire - Andreas Malm 2021

 

"The fact that [Gandhi] can emerge as an icon of the climate movement - not to mention 'our scientist of the human spirit' - attests to the dept of the regression in political consciousness between the twentieth and the twenty-first century."

"The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power."

"The insistence on sweeping militancy under the rug of civility - now dominant not only in the climate movement, but in most Anglo-American thinking and theorising about social movements - is itself a symptom of one of the deepest gaps between the present and all that happened from the Haitian Revolution to the poll tax riots: the demise of revolutionary politics. It barely exists any longer as a living praxis in powerful movements or as a foil against which their demands can be set. From the years around 1789 to those around 1989, revolutionary politics maintained actuality and dynamic potentiality, but since the 1980s it has been defamed, antiquated, unlearned and turned unreal."

"'Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.' as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist."

"the [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] understood oil as a material base for the hostile trinity - US imperialism, Israeli colonialism, Arab reaction - and sabotage as a way to 'strike at the ligaments of empire.'"

"There is a very tight correlation between income and wealth on the one hand and CO2 emissions on the other. It has been demonstrated from Canada to China: a diminutive share of the population accounts for a wildly outsized portion of the gas released. To be rich in the world today is to come out on top in the distribution of the 'unequal ability to pollute', as Dario Kenner names it in his Carbon Inequality."

"'Can we really equate', [Agarwal and Narain] asked, 'the carbon dioxide contributions of gas guzzling automobiles in Europe and North America or, for that matter, anywhere in the Third World with the methane emissions of draught cattle and rice fields of subsistence farmers in West Bengal or Thailand? Do these people not have a right to live? A quantum of methane from a ruminant or paddy might have the same radiative forcing as a quantum of CO2 from an SUV... but the moral substances are like chalk and cheese."

"The rich could claim ignorance in 1913. Not so now. A group of American and British criminologists have consequently argued that conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels ought to be classified as a crime. It is aggravated by the circumstance, secondly, that the main source of luxury emissions - the hypermobility of the rich, their inordinate flying and yachting and driving - is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they can always shift to safer locations. To be super-rich and hypermobile above 400ppm is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke."

"On the standard view, which also seems to be King's, an inanimate object can undergo violence by virtue of being property - standing in a relation, that is, to a human being, who can claim to be indirectly hurt when it is hurt... But this indirectness is also what sets property destruction apart, for one cannot equate the treatment of people with the treatment of the things they own... There is, however, one exception, one type of property destruction that approaches killing and maiming, namely that which hits material conditions for subsistence: poisoning someone's groundwater, burning down a family's last remaining grove of olive trees or, for that matter, firebombing a paddy field in an Indian peasant village because it emits methane would come close to a stab in the heart."

"The tolerance for subaltern violence stands in inverse relation to the consequent suffusion of a social formation with violence - the American allergy, in other words, is a pathology."

"Look at it which way you will, from the angle of investment, production or consumption, it is the rich that drive the emergency, and a climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home. A movement that refuses to make the distinctions between classes and colliding interests will end up on the wrong side of the tracks."

"There is no way a movement can ever get its hands on fossil fuel combustion. 'No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches or in direct actions,' the energy is beyond reach, because people 'do not help produce it. They only consume.'"

"'The fight is, definitely, not yet lost - in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.' If fatalists think that mitigation is meaningful only at a time when damage is yet to be done, they have misunderstood the basics of both climate science and movement."

"Climate fatalism is for the jaded and the deflated; it is a 'bourgeois luxury', in the plain language of one Swedish critic."

[quotes] The One-Straw Revolution - Masanobu Fukuoka 1978

 

"Once the farmer has determined that a plot of land should grow rice or vegetables and has cast the seed, he must assume responsibility for maintaining that plot. To disrupt nature and then abandon her is harmful and irresponsible."

"Mr. Fukuoka believes that natural farming proceeds from the spiritual health of the individual. He considers the healing of the land and the purification of the human spirit to be one process, and he proposes a way of life and a way of farming in which this process can take place."

"I could only think of this concept of non-usefulness as being of great benefit to the world, and particularly the present world which is moving so rapidly in the opposite direction."

"Formal schooling has no intrinsic value, but becomes necessary when humanity creates a condition in which one must become 'educated' to get along."

"It is the same with the scientist. He pores over books night and day, straining his eyes and becoming nearsighted, and if you wonder what on earth he has been working on all that time - it is to become the inventor of eyeglasses to correct nearsightedness."

"Nature does not change, although the way of viewing nature invariably changes from age to age. No matter the age, natural farming exists forever as the wellspring of agriculture."

"Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create. Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life."

"Farming out of season is becoming more and more popular all the time. To have mandarin oranges just one month earlier, the people in the city seem happy enough to pay for the farmer's extra investment in labor and equipment. But if you ask how important it is for human beings to have this fruit a month earlier, the truth is that it is not important at all, and money is not the only price paid for such indulgence."

"If a high price is charged for natural food, it means that the merchant is taking excessive profits. Furthermore, if natural foods are expensive, they become luxury foods and only rich people are able to afford them."

"In general, commercial agriculture is an unstable proposition. The farmer would do much better by growing the food he needs without thinking about making money. If you plant one grain of rice, it becomes more than one thousand grains. One row of turnips makes enough pickles for the entire winter. If you follow this line of thought, you will have enough to eat, more than enough, without struggling. But if you decide to try to make money instead, you get on board the profit wagon, and it runs away with you."

"It seems to me that the greater one's desires, the more one has to work to satisfy them."

"Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced."

"If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature's productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire."

"We have been born and are living on the earth to face directly the reality of living."

"I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think this is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time."

"Pure natural farming, by contrast, is the no-stroke school. It goes nowhere and seeks no victory."

"If you expect a bright world on the other side of the tunnel, the darkness of the tunnel lasts all the longer. When you no longer want to eat something tasty, you can taste the real flavor of whatever you are eating. It is easy to lay out the simple foods of a natural diet on the dining table, but those who can truly enjoy such a feast are few."

"Just playing or doing nothing at all, children are happy. A discriminating adult, on the other hand, decides what will make him happy, and when these conditions are met he feels satisfied. Foods taste good to him not necessarily because they have nature's subtle flavors and are nourishing to the body, but because his taste has been conditioned to the idea that they taste good."

"It is said that there is no creature as wise as the human being. By applying this wisdom, people have become the only animals capable of nuclear war."

"'Why do you have to develop? If economic growth rises from 5% to 10%, is happiness going to double? What's wrong with a growth rate of 0%? Isn't this a rather stable kind of economics? Could there be anything better than living simply and taking it easy?"

"There is nowhere better than this world. Years ago I realized that we human beings are good just as we are and I set out to enjoy my life."

[quotes] Carceral Capitalism - Jackie Wang 2018

 

"Prisons and law enforcement may actually grow when the ideology of small government is hegemonic because the maintenance of law and order is considered the proper (morally authorized) domain of government. For Bernard E. Harcourt, neoliberal penality is rooted in 'the assumption of government legitimacy and competence in the penal arena and, on the other hand, the presumption that the government should not play a role elsewhere.'"

"Thus, as growth in the 'real' economy remains low, in our perverted debt economy, falsely categorizing borrowers as delinquent has become a financial opportunity in itself."

"All of this to say that a vast number of humans - whether they are laborers or soldiers - may become superfluous, though they my still be needed (for now at least) as users and consumers."

"This antagonistic relationship to production also redefines how the People's War is waged: rather than seizing the means of production, Jackson emphasized the destruction of the protective and productive forces."

"Law itself is a construction designed specifically to manage 'poor, desperate people like me.'"

"Will these credit instruments and the 'discipline of the free market' reduce our lives to the acquisition of 'marketable skills' and make it impossible to explore, wander, create, invent, learn (as opposed to 'acquiring skills'), relax, form non-instrumentalized social bonds, loaf, and daydream? Without a revolution or a social movement to overturn or counter the direction of the debt economy and techno-capitalism, we might be catapulted into a future where our lives are disciplined and determined by our dependency on credit."

"But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists. In order to turn peasants, small craftsmen, and others into workers who have nothing to sell but their labor power, these people must first be alienated from their means of subsistence."

"1) Capitalism is inherently expansionary, as it seeks to realize an ever-increasing amount of surplus value; 2) There is no reason why surplus value need be realized within the formal capitalist sphere when realization can be secured through violence, state force, colonization, militarism, war, the use of international credit to promote the interests of the hegemonies, the expropriation of indigenous land, predatory tariffs and taxes, hyper-exploitation, and the pilfering of the public purse."

"Harvey agrees with Luxemburg's claim that capitalism has a dual character: one sphere is governed by freedom of contract and the rule of law while the other is dominated by political violence and looting carried out by hegemonic capitalist nations. The looting component of the accumulation process is often carried out through the international credit system, which Harvey notes is the linchpin of late capitalism."

"To accept risk scores as an index of personal competency is to embrace a liberal politics of personal agency, where those who work hard to maintain good credit get what they deserve."

"The idea that people have a moral obligation to make good on their promise to pay their debts is partly tied to the idea that freedom means personally bearing the risks of your actions and decisions."

"A generation - financiers, abolitionists, actuaries, jurists, preachers, legislators, corporate executives, philosophers, social scientists - developed a vision of freedom that linked the liberal ideal of self-ownership to the personal assumption of 'risk.'" - Freaks of Fortune, Jonathan Levy

"the credit system is legitimized by the moral framework that shapes our understanding of debt - whereby the creditor is framed as benevolent while the struggling debtors are viewed as lazy or irresponsible for defaulting on their loans. However, as lending practices become more predatory, this moral framework is at risk of unraveling."

"The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis - not reckless public spending. The situation has led to the development of socially deleterious methods of revenue extraction that target vulnerable populations, particularly poor black Americans."

"However, I want to emphasize that the state is no ordinary borrower; it is a borrower endowed with the legal power to loot the public to pay back its creditors."

"... a municipality's financial standing (or its credit-worthiness) is partly tied to its ability to remain solvent by using the police power and court system to extract revenue from citizens."

"The kapitalistate framework also posits that two primary functions of the state in a capitalist society are to facilitate the accumulation process and to legitimize capitalism."

"Foucault asserts that biopolitical forms of power target the 'aleatory,' unpredictable, and potentially destabilizing elements of a population for the sake of keeping the whole population in balance."

"Foucault puts it bluntly when he says, 'In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable... Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.'" - Society Must be Defended

"It's as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: 'Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.' That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day - the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state."

"For Gilmore, the problem 'is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds.'"

"The media construction of urban ghettos and prisons as 'alternate universes' marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of 'void' zones that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. Whatever happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an 'injustice' does not register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms."

"Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize."

"Surviving gendered violence does not make the survivor incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence... That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts."

"I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing - and the unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit - as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer perfomativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the 'Care of the Self'- style 'politics' of choice."

"Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies onto which they project hostile feelings, allowing them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence."

"The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as 'criminals.'"

"When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that require passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point."

"But what if - instead of reacting to these charges with counterarguments that persuasively demonstrate that the abolitionist position is the only sensible position - we instead strategically use these charges themselves as points of departure to show how the prison itself is a problem for thought that can only be unthought using a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the Present?"

"When we act in accordance with the prophetic dream, the dream comes to directly constitute reality."

"Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution."

[quotes] The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study - Stefano Harney and Fred Moten 2013

  

“Debt, as Harney puts is, presumes a kind of individualized relation to a naturalized economy that is predicated upon exploitation” 

“we cannot be satisfied with the recognition adn acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls” 

“In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to power, one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other, the other who has been rendered nonentity by colonialism. Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order.”

“when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening.”

“no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing this shit down until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”

“If there is no church in the wild, if there is study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to it.”

“Critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique.”

“We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”

“In fact, there is no state theory in public administration programs in the United States. Instead, the state is regarded as the proverbial devil we know. And whether it is understood in public administration as a necessary evil, or as a good that is nonetheless of limited usefulness and availability, it is always entirely knowable as an object. Therefore it is not so much that these programs are set against themselves. It is rather that they are set against some students, particularly those who come to public administration with a sense of what Derrida has called a duty beyond duty, or a passion.”

“Any attempt at passion, at stepping out of this skepticism of the known into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself, must be suppressed by this professionalization.”

“The state, the economy, and civil society may change size or shape, labor may enter or exit, and ethical consideration may vary, but these objects are both positivistic and normative, standing in discrete, spatial arrangement each to the other.”

“Perhaps then it needs to be said that the crack dealer, terrorist, and political prisoner share a commitment to war, and society responds in kind with wars on crime, terror, drugs, communism.”

“perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence.”

“The university, then, is not the opposite of prison, since they are both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social individual.”

“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

“The anoriginary drive and the insistences it calls into being and moves through, that criminality that brings the law online, the runaway anarchic ground of unpayable debt and untold wealth, the fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially - poor but extravagant as opposed to frugal - is blackness which must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it.”

“Whom do we mean when we say ‘there’s nothing wrong with us’? The fat ones. The ones who are out of all compass however precisely they are located. The ones who are not conscious when they listen to Les McCann. The Screamers who don’t say much, insolently. The churchgoers who value impropriety. The ones who manage to evade self-management in the enclosure. The ones without interest who bring the muted noise and mutant grammar of the new general interest by refusing. The new general intellect extending the long, extra-genetic line of extra-moral obligation to disturb and evade intelligence. Our cousins. All our friends.”

“The Soviets used to say that the United States had free speech but no one could hear you over the noise of the machines.”

“The NGO is the research and development arm of governance finding new ways to bring to blackness what it is said to lack, the thing that cannot be brought, interests.”

“When governance is understood as the criminalisation of being without interests, as a regulation brought into being by criminality, where criminality is the excess left from criminalisation, a certain fragility emerges, a certain limit, an uncertain imposition by a greater drive, the mere utterance of whose name has again become too black, too strong altogether.”

“Credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialisation. So long as they pair in the monogamous violence of the home, the pension, the government, or the university, debt can only feed credit, debt can only desire credit.”

“Governance only works when you work, when you tell us your interests, when you invest your interests again in debt and credit. Governance is the therapy of your interests, and your interests will bring your credit back. You will have an investment, even in debt.”

“The student with interests can demand policies, can formulate policy, give herself credit, pursue bad debtors with good policy, sound policy, evidence-based policy. The student with credit can privatize her own university. The student can start her own NGO, invite others to identify their interests, put them on the table, join the global conversation, speak for themselves, get credit, manage debt. Governance is interest-bearing. Credit and debt. There is no other definition of good governance, no other interest. The public and private in harmony, in policy, in pursuit of bad debt, on the trail of fugitive publics, chasing evidence of refuge. The student graduates.”

“What we are calling policy is the new form command takes as command takes hold.”

“Policy is thus arrayed in the exclusive and exclusionary uniform/ity of contingency as imposed consensus, which both denies and at the very same time seeks to destroy the ongoing plans, the fugitive initiations, the black operations, of the multitude.”

“As resistance from above, policy is a new class phenomenon because the act of making policy for others, of pronouncing others as incorrect, is at the same time an audition for a post-fordist economy that deputies believe rewards those who embrace change but which, in reality, arrests them in contingency, flexibility, and that administered precarity that imagines itself to be immune from what Judith Butler might call our undercommon precariousness. This economy is powered by constant and automatic insistence upon the externalisation of risk, the placement at an externally imposed risk of all life, so that work against risk can be harvested without end.”

“Policy is the form that opportunism takes in this environment, as the embrace of the radically extra-economic, political character of command today… It is a demonstration designed to separate you from others, in the interest of a universality reduced to private property that is not yours, that is the fiction of your own advantage… its ability to see the future of its own survival in this turmoil against those who cannot imagine surviving in this turmoil… Every utterance of policy, no matter its intent or content, is first and foremost a demonstration of one’s ability to be close to the top in the hierarchy of the post-fordist economy.”

“Policy is correction, forcing itself with mechanical violence upon the incorrect, the uncorrected, the ones who do not know to seek their own correction.”

“Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people.”

“Policy’s vision is to break it up then fix it, move it along by fixing it, manufacture ambition and give it to your children. Policy’s hope is that there will be more policy, more participation, more change.”

“To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption.”

“Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of logistics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters.”

“Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against Atlantic slaves.”

“Blackness is the site where absolute nothingness and the world of things converge. Blackness is fantasy in the hold and Wilderson’s access to it is in that he is one who has nothing and is, therefore, both more and less than one. He is the shipped. We are the shipped, if we choose to be, if we elect to pay an unbearable cost that is inseparable from an incalculatble benefit.”

“Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem.”

“There’s a touch, a feel you want more of, which releases you.”

“What is we thought of the experiment of the hold as the absolute fluidity, the informality, of this condition of need and ability? What if ability and need were in constant play and we found someone who dispossed us so that this movement was our inheritance.”

“it’s not so much having a shoebox in which I’m writing down my thoughts as that I’m having a long conversation with a few people.”

“If you ask me, I couldn’t tell you, ‘oh there are these four or five ideas that I’m constant going back to that I have to have in my box.’ It doesn’t feel that way. It feels more like there are one or two things that I’ve been talking about with people forever.”

“the concepts are ways to develop a mode of living together, a mode of being together that cannot be shared as model but as an instance.”

“I’ve been thinking more and more of study as something not where everybody dissolves into the student, but where people sort of take turns doing things for each other or for the others, and where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they do something.”

“and we just basically had the temerity to believe that our desire for some other mode of being in the world had to be connected to our attempt to understand the way that we were living and the conditions under which we were living at that moment.”

“Everybody is pissed off all the time and feels bad, but very seldom do you enter into a conversation where people are going, ‘why is it that this doesn’t feel good to us?’”

“But, that’s the insidious thing, this naturalisation of misery, the belief that intellectual work requires alienation and immobility and that the ensuing pain and nausea is a kind of badge of honor, a kind of stripe you can apply to your academic robe or something. Enjoyment is suspect, untrustworthy, a mark of illegitimate privilege or of some kind of sissified refusal to look squarely into the fucked-up face of things which is, evidently, only something you can do in isolation.”

“I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that.”

“On the other hand, it does seem to me that you’re asking people to call themselves into a certain form of identity. This is what Gayatri means by the first right being the right to refuse rights, I think.”

“And I don’t say that people should suddenly not do NGO work. But, I also feel that it’s necessary for us to try to elaborate some other forms that don’t take us through those political steps, that don’t require becoming self-determining enough to have a voice and have interests - and to acknowledge that people don’t need to have interests to be with each other.”

“how important it would be, how interesting it might be, what new kinds of things might emerge out of the capacity to refuse to issue the call to order.”

“What emerges is a form, out of something that we call informality. The informal is not the absence of form. It’s the thing that gives form. The informal is not formlessness.”

“the first act of management is to imagine that what’s informal or what’s already going on requires some act to organize it, rather than to join it, rather than to find ways to experiment with this general antagonism.”

“You need to elaborate the principle of autonomy in a way in which you become even less of yourself; or you overflow more than what you’re doing right now. You just need to do more of the shit that you’re doing right now, and that will produce the scale.”

“So, that with and for, the reason we move into more autonomous situations is that it grows, and we spend less time in the antagonism of within and against.”

“The first thing I made everyday when I went to university was myself, and the university these days is not necessarily the best place to make yourself.”

“I owe everything to my mother, I owe everything to my mentor. That stuff also becomes very quickly repressive and very moralistic. There has to be a way in which there can be elaborations of unpayable debt that don’t always return to an individualisation through the family or an individualisation through the wage laborer, but instead the debt becomes a principle of elaboration. And therefore it’s not that you wouldn’t owe people in something like an economy, or you wouldn’t owe your mother, but that the word ‘owe’ would disappear and it would become some other word, it would be a more generative word.”

“But I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.”

“I think and I concur, is an abolition of credit, of the system of credit, which is to say, maybe it’s an abolition of accounting. It says that when we start to talk about our common resources, when we talk about what Marx means by wealth - the division of it, the accumulation of it, the privatization of it, and the accounting of it - all of that shit should be abolished. I mean, you can’t count how much we owe one another. It’s not countable. It doesn’t work that way.”

“People were telling us, ‘she owes her son a hundred thousand dollars.’ And me and Laura, driving back, we were like, ‘how you gonna owe your son a hundred thousand dollars? How do you owe a parent a hundred thousand dollars?’ That’s some crazy, barbaric shit. You have to be a barbaric monster to even be able to think of some shit like that. You know what? It’s no more barbaric than owing Wells Fargo Bank a hundred thousand dollars. You think at first glance that it’s barbaric because it appears to violate some sort of notion of filial, maternal relation. But, it’s barbaric because it’s a barbaric way of understanding our undercommon-ness.”

“What I’m really saying when I say that is: anybody who’s breathing should have everything that they need and 93% of what they want - not by virtue of the fact that you work today, but by virtue of the fact that you are here.”

“So, you want to figure out some way that that wealth can be enjoyed. And that’s not by managing it, because managing it is the first step to accounting for it, attributing it or distributing it. It’s about developing some way of being with each other, and of not thinking that that requires the mediation of politics. But, it requires elaboration, it requires improvisation, it requires a kind of rehearsal. It requires things. It’s just that it doesn’t require accounting or management. It requires study.”

[quotes] The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors - Lama Rod Owens 2023

 

"I am not a New Saint because I feel divine or extraordinary. I am a New Saint because I have chosen to give a shit about myself and everyone around me and because I have figured out much of the work I need to do to help people experience the freedom to be their most authentic selves, I do that work, and I keep showing up to do that work."

"Systems of dominance have co-opted the work of goodness to keep people from disrupting systemic violence. In this sense, goodness is understood to be an expression of virtue if it does not challenge the power imbalance and does not make the people who benefit the most from that power imbalance uncomfortable. When you are good, you are not causing trouble. Here I define trouble as creating discomfort for others."

“goodness is the choice I am making each moment to do what is conducive to freedom for me and others. Goodness is a verb that I am actively engaging with: I like to say, ‘I am gooding’ as opposed to ‘I am being good.’

"Voting, educating ourselves, highlighting the voices of the most underrepresented folks, being at least liberal, recycling, carrying people's groceries, reading the current justice books, never saying 'Candyman' into a mirror, putting up Black Lives Matter signs, saying please and thank you, paying taxes, not wearing white shoes after Labor Day, supporting charities, avoiding cracks and walking under ladders, and offering thoughts and prayers are all wonderful things to do, but they are more about feeling good about ourselves and making sure others view us favorably. Which of these beloved labors will actually get us free?"

"Saints are people from various spiritual and religious traditions who have deeply embodied love and compassion and whose embodiment has inspired countless others to aspire to that same practice."

"... the real superpower of the Buddhist saint is giving a shit - giving a shit is an expression of their bodhicitta, or their deep desire to help free people from suffering."

"The first practice is the expression of what I call awakened care: an expression of love and compassion for themselves and others, an expression of joy all grounded in clarity. The most profound care we and others can experience is to be free from suffering and all the causes and conditions of suffering. The second practice is the development of the capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity to everything that arises for us by choosing to experience what arises for us, which helps us transition into a place of responsiveness. Experiencing and then choosing how to respond with care is an expression of liberation. The New Saint can choose the most beneficial way to respond to anything."

"We will not get everyone free because not all of us are ready to be free. When someone isn't ready to be free, forcing them to do the labor of awakening becomes an act of violence. We can neither drag people to freedom nor scare them, manipulate them, intimidate them, or use one of our favorite collective techniques - yell at them on social media - to get them to freedom... Training in awakened care is training in love, compassion, and joy, which helps us to get clear about what it takes to get people free. We can't do the work for others. Each of us must choose liberation on our own terms, and in doing so, commit to our individual labor."

"What we need is vital. If we don't get our needs met, not only will it be difficult to meet the needs of others, but we may also start manipulating those we have committed to help to get our unmet needs fulfilled in ways that are harmful and unethical. On the New Saint's path, we must figure out what we need and acknowledge that our unmet needs create distractions for us and impact the work of liberation for others. This is one of the most challenging aspects of the New Saint's work. We must love ourselves enough to care for ourselves and, in doing so, reduce the labor we force others to do for us."

"... it can become easy to mistake collecting practices as the practice and work itself."

"Freedom is the agency to choose how we want to be in relationship with ourselves and the world around us."

"Regardless of whether we are conscious of this or not, our deepest longing is to remember our liberation, but if we are not actively working to get free, then in a way we are consenting to the delusion of the state."

"When I began practicing community service and activism, I was trying to get free from the violence of systemic oppressions ranging from racism to queerphobia. IT seemed that the best way to honor my life was to dedicate my life's labor to studying freedom, trying to get free, and helping others around me get free."

"With the remembrance came an ethical responsibility called compassion"

"We abolish anything that prevents us from being in direct, honest, and compassionate relationships first with ourselves and then the communities we belong to."

"Most of us are afraid to get free because in freedom we have to do the labor of figuring out who we are... The ego functions best when its boundaries are defined for it... We can't handle space and openness; we don't understand what they say about who are are. Most of us will not get free anytime soon because we don't want to be free. It costs too much. We are too dependent on being defined by the closet... We have become acclimated to the suffering of everything, and we tell ourselves this is how it is and must be."

"Liberation is my primary goal in life, and I am training to align everything I do, say, and think with the goal of liberation. Therefore, I do what is conducive to getting free, while letting go of activity that is not conducive to freedom. This framework helps me to understand that what others have to do to get free is not necessarily what I have to do to get free and vice versa. This keeps me from judging other people's work."

"My ethics are also how I maintain my integrity. My integrity is my clarity as it pertains to the work I am doing in this life. My work is to get free and help as many others get free as possible. The intensity of this clarity is often read as arrogance from people who are not that clear about their work. Most people I meet have jobs and professions that they feel obligated to do to make money. A lot of people don't get joy from their work. It is hard for people to understand that my work is my life; it is what I have chosen as the best possible thing for me to do to benefit people. I am cared for in this work. I am joyful in this work. My needs are met in this work. I am fortunate to have the support I do in this work. This may sound like bragging, but this is what it feels like to find and do your work."

"Love means we touch the ground of reality as it is, not as we want it to be. It is the labor of telling the truth and allowing the truth to tell us. And none of this is supposed to be easy. Allowing ourselves to expand the pain into the space and then to start identifying with the space is how love frees us."

"Conditional love is an expression of love from a place of separation and contraction. People weaponize it against others. I consider conditional loving an act of both personal and interpersonal psychic terrorism that hurts both the person expression conditional love as well as the recipient."

"Compassion is the meeting point between deep empathy for our pain and the pain of others and the wish for us all to be liberated from this pain. The work that arises out of compassion is the strategic and informed intervention into the experience of pain... As I've gotten older, I've begun to feel compassion as an opening to freedom, fluidity, agency, and power to determine how we want to experience freedom. Compassion is not just about caring. It is not the obligatory 'thoughts and prayers' after a tragedy. IT is the work we engage in that begins to undo the root causes of the tragedy."

"Our suffering turns into violence when we can't hold space for the discomfort it causes. We react to it in ways that erase or bypass the experience of who we believe is causing us to suffer. This reactivity replaces the labor of holding and experiencing, distracting us from tending to the primary suffering."

"Felt in the body, joy is the experience of release, a letting go that feels like putting down a heavy package. At other times joy is the experience of the body as a blooming flower. Joy makes us expand outward to connect to all phenomena. We are no longer afraid of everything around us."

"A want is something that feels good to have and experience. Wants fulfill basic desires for pleasure and fun. Though pleasure and fun are wonderful and can also be needs, when we lack an awareness of how to use pleasure as an experience of liberation, it can become self-indulgent, leading to overconsumption. Overconsumption means I bypass what is needed in favor of accumulation. Often I use consumption to cover up or numb discomfort."

"We must know what we need and what we want in order to support the collective in a way that is not reproducing harm and violence. When I know what I need and want, I'll also understand the things that I can't do for myself. And so when I Lean on the collective, knowing what I am asking those around me to help me with, I also understand what I can offer back to the collective. The path of liberatory self-care isn't about bypassing what I need in order to perform a kind of selflessness that makes me look good. Liberatory self-care is about understanding what I need and then understanding how to get what I need while offering others what they need. Ultimately, what we all need is to get free."

"When I think of home, I think of being in a place where I am wanted. I think of being in a place where people notice me and see me. It is a place where I can say my name without fear of being judged or being afraid of hurting someone's feelings. Home means belonging not just to a physical location or a group of people, but to myself. When I say 'home,' I mean that I am resting in my own experience. I am resting within the recognition of who I am, not within the projections of those around me telling me who I am. This king of belonging is restorative care we can offer to ourselves."

"As I find myself sailing through my middle-aged years, it seems that I am becoming like the old church elders, always praying and fasting, watching and fighting. I used to rebel against becoming an old, praying Black man, but this expression is native to my flesh and bones, buried deep in my DNA. My ancestors have called me into the world; I consent to being a reflection of them."

"I also use this space to acknowledge that my body is an extension of the earth, and like the earth, it is a primary support - there can be no work without my body."

"I have known for years that as a descendant of enslaved people I would have to return, somehow, to the experience of the Middle Passage because, as Mother Alice Walker has taught, healing begins where the wound was made."

"She was both a youth and an elder. Her strength never faltered. She was both a mountain and running water, hurricane and gentle breath."

"Touching the earth reminds me that I am an extension of it. The ground feels like my own body. The water is my blood. The wind is my breath. The rain is my tears. The thunder is my anger... To touch the earth is to remember that the earth is alive, free, awakened, and feeling - that it remembers and mourns, that it loves and has no animosity toward us, that it can support us in getting free."

"My body is a loving extension of the earth. Stillness, stability, and a capacity for nurturing and growth are qualities that the earth and body share. When I die, I will be returned to the earth through burial or fire. My ashes will be scattered back to the earth, my Mother. When I walk on the earth, I am walking on my body. When I lie on the earth, I am lying on my body. When the earth is in trauma, I am in trauma. When the earth is colonized, I am colonized."

"I have the hands of people who had to mold survival out of earth; who touched the earth and prayed for food, built shelter from wood and brick, washed clothes by the creek, hauled and sewed, kneaded and braided, held babies, and dug graves for their dead. My ancestors and I link hands together across realms."

"When I am touched by others, they are transferring the essence of their lineage into my body. Just through one touch, I know what they have survived and what their songs are. I can feel their joy, how they have cried in their life, how they have wanted to be free. How we touch is an expression of how other people have touched us."

"My lips remember so many other lips I have kissed in pleasure, in friendship, or as blessing. My kisses have adorned so many bodies. The only reason to have lips is for this adornment."

"I have decided to get braces to further care for my teeth. It was an act of care for myself, and I have noticed how much more I smile and let the world see my teeth. Sometimes we need to do things like this because of how it can help us support our work of helping others. I wish that I could use my practice to transcend anxiety about my teeth, but sometimes we can take a quicker, more worldly path to reduce suffering."

"I feel the erotic when I close my eyes and shift my attention to my heartbeat and the way it reverberates within the essence of all phenomenal reality. The whole world is alive with my pounding heart. The masculine erotic is a life force; it is the point at which I start believing that things are workable and changeable."

"Darkness can be an expression of a different kind of clarity - one that invites us to consider how darkness isn't necessarily asking us to figure it out but instead is asking us to take care of it."

"Loving God is the only way to God in the same way love is the only path to liberation."

"In the New Saint's tradition, I define forgiveness as the experience of wanting the person that hurt me to experience the care they need to be well."

"Of course, disprivileged communities have had to develop a sensitivity to the needs of dominant groups to survive. Maybe we didn't really forgive dominant offender groups, but we had to pretend to in order to make the dominant groups reduce violence against us."

"I love you, but I don't trust you. I don't know how to say that when I look into your eyes. All I see are all my own unmet needs for belonging looking back at me. I know it was never more than just a moment, or a cuddle and orgasm, and yet I still want to run away from this. I get it now. I need more than what I taught myself to settle for."

"I am haunted by how we are born into this world beautiful ones and how that beauty gets broken up into little pieces. And then, broken up, we go about trying to collect the little pieces of our beauty while calling that gathering a life. It is the labor of re-membering not being that occupies our living."

"It's not just about me and this life or this moment; it's about everything. We have a responsibility to remember we are in debt to the beautiful ones who have made our living possible and full of potential. This recognition is how I choose to continue. My heart is full of sorrow and at the same time my heart is a vast ocean of care that can tend to the sorrow. If you don't get this, you will never understand why I do the things that I do."

"And although sometimes I am confused about what freedom feels like or if I am as free as I think I am, I know this for sure: I consent to this sacred work. I consent to the brokenheartedness, the rage, and the hopelessness, as well as to the joy, the gratitude, and the care. I consent to the weight of being healed and the responsibility I choose to get others well and free. This has been the only choice for me in this life. With the help of the saints, both old and new, I keep moving on."

[quotes] Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century - James and Grace Lee Boggs 1974

 

"... we had warned that capitalism had entered a new stage, the stage of multinational capitalism, which was even more destructive than finance and monopoly capitalism because it threatened our communities and our cities."

"When King flew to Watts on August 15, he discovered to his surprise that few black youth in Watts had even heard of him or his strategy of nonviolence, and that, despite the loss of lives, they were claiming victory because their violence had forced the authorities to acknowledge their existence."

"In order to regain our humanity, he said, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values against the triples of racism, materialism, and militarism."

"The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death. Until the revolutionary forces come to power here, this country will not be safe for the world and revolutionary warfare on an international scale against the United States will remain the wave of the present - unless all of humanity goes up in one big puff."

"It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher humanity instead of the higher standard of living dependent upon empire."

"In their impatience they see the relation between theory and practice as an antagonistic one. What they call 'practice' is activism: 'Enough of this talk, let's do somethin even if it's wrong.' They have no concept of the flow from revolutionary theory to revolutionary practice and then back again to enriched theory through the evaluation of systemic practice."

"Rebellion is a stage in the development of revolution, but it is not revolution. It is an important stage because it represents the 'standing up,' the assertion of their humanity on the part of the oppressed."

"Hence a rebellion begins with the feeling by the oppressed that 'we can change the way things are,' but it usually ends up by saying 'they ought to do this and they ought to do that.' So that while a rebellion generally begins with the rebels believing in their right to determine their own destiny, it usually ends up with the rebels feeling that their destiny is, in fact, determined by others."

"The only justification for a revolution is that it advances the evolution of man/woman."

"We must know what is the principal contradiction before we can decide who is on the right side and who is on the wrong side."

"How should people spend their lives? Is it sufficient to say that capitalism is responsible for the present state of affairs and that we are all its victims? Or is it necessary to develop new conceptions of appropriate social and human relations and then the concrete programs of struggle necessary to realize these conceptions?"

"A revolutionist must absorb and internalize the lives, the passions, and the aspirations of great revolutionary leaders and not just those of the masses."

"More valuable than those who would die for the revolution are those who would give the rest of their lives to it."

"That is why revolutionary politics is not just a way of contemplating reality but changes reality. The revolutionists who build an organization take responsibility for projecting their answers to the masses. This interaction produces new questions which require new answers and so on. When you become convinced that society must make a sharp break with past values and practices, you become revolutionary. But you do not become a revolutionist until you have organized with others in an organization which takes responsibility for this continuing process of answers and questions."

"They have not accepted the responsibility of revolutionary leadership, which is not just to sympathize with the masses over their wrongs or encourage them in their militancy. That is what the liberal does. Revolutionary leadership, as distinct from liberal leadership, has the duty to help the masses understand what their political goals must be if they are going to achieve any fundamental solution to their problems."

"Having acknowledged the historical and theoretical problem, Lenin saw no concrete alternative to setting up the machinery for centralized planning and controls with all the dangers of a bureaucratic apparatus this entailed and which were soon to become a monstrous fact."

"In doing so, he had left open the question as to whether the entire nation, race, or people oppressed by imperialism constituted the equivalent of an oppressed class."

"In every class society, the masses live restricted lives dominated by economic considerations, while politics remains the province of the ruling class or its agents, the politicians."

"In this concept of transformation or remolding of the masses, Mao was drawing on the centuries-old Chinese cultural tradition which, since the time of Confucius, has stressed moral rather than legal force as the foundation for political authority and legitimacy, and conceives goodness in terms of relation between people rather than as a moral quality which an individual can have on his/her own."

"The oppressed are an integral part of the system which oppresses them, unless they break loose from that system. Therefore until they begin to change themselves, i.e., to become self-determining rather than determined, they cannot get rid of oppressive institutions. Moreover, eliminating oppressive institutions only provides the external conditions for the transformation of people; it does not guarantee that people will change. The change in people has to be made by people themselves."

"Nothing is an end in itself except the continuing struggle to advance, to enlarge one's humanity. Freedom is not for the sake of freedom, democracy is not for the sake of democracy, organization is not for the sake of organization. Each of these is only a means to the evolutionary human goal."

"... rapid human development is a product not of rapid economic development, as the Russian leaders claim, but of political struggles."

"New ideas are not just born... they are created by actual living individuals, with a very few pioneering for the great majority... They come from creative, thoughtful individuals, reflecting upon a specific historical reality which they recognize must be changed, and upon what others have done in the past to try to change that reality."

"National liberation must put an end not only to suffering, but to backwardness. It must enable Africans to rejoin the mainstream of human history and human evolution from which they have been excluded by imperialism. The struggle for national liberation must transform the masses from their present passivity and dependence on others. It must develop in them and through them the power, the will, the capacity, and the structures to govern their own accelerated development. The masses must begin to see themselves as making their own history."

"Only in this way would the ideas, the politics, be in command of the weapons, making the combatants armed militants rather than militarists."

"No matter how close may be the similarity between cases and between the identities of our enemy, national liberation and social revolution are not for export. They are - and every day they become more so - the outcome of a local and national elaboration that is more or less influenced by external factors (favorable or not) but essentially determined and influenced by the historical reality of each people, and carried to success by right solutions to the internal contradictions which arise in this reality."

"Every revolution is the effort to resolve the specific contradictions of a particular society, and can therefore only develop by its own dynamic, through a series of struggles, evaluation of struggles, and new projections for struggling along one road rather than another, by actual living individuals who emerge from but who also expand the social experiences and political perspectives of their people."

"Revolutionists in the United States have yet to wrestle with the awesome challenge of uniting these opposites in a society which has been the beneficiary rather than the victim of imperialist exploitation."

"In a revolutionary period when one's friends and family are likely to be engaged in some form of movement activity, a revolutionist cannot develop the confidence necessary for protracted struggle unless he/she is absolutely clear about the philosophical, historical, and social limitations of other proposals for action."

"First, it must define the main contradiction facing the particular society, the main need and the main aspiration of the people, and hence the main task of the revolution. Then it must propagandize and organize the people to recognize this need and carry out this task."

"The American forces possess a great deal of technical know-how but they have absolutely no sense of political know-why. They fight with machines according to machine principles. There is nothing they can do with the people in Southeast Asia - except exterminate them by converting them into body counts or pacify them by removing them into refugee camps. People have to become numbers and objects first before the American forces know how to deal with them."

"Most people spend their whole lifetime just being utilitarian or materialist, preoccupied only with questions of physical survival and comforts. They do only what they have to do in their own self-interest and/or what they are told to do. They accept whatever occurs in society as beyond their control, as being fixed by others."

"For any fundamental reorganization of society to take place, the eyes and hearts of those at the bottom must be opened to a new, more advanced way of human beings living together."

"As a result, the traditional skills of the craftsman were destroyed, as were al relations between people not based on money."

"Revolutionists seek to change reality, to make it better. Therefore, revolutionists not only need the revolutionary philosophy of dialectics. They need a revolutionary ideology, i.e., a body of ideas based on analyzing the main contradiction of the particular society which they are trying to change, projecting a vision of higher form of reality in which this contradiction would be resolved, and relating this resolution to a social force or forces responsible for and capable of achieving it... Every revolutionist must be absolutely clear about this sequence - from revolutionary philosophy, to revolutionary ideology, to revolutionary politics."

"There still remained the much more difficult and protracted task of creating the new positive of a new social system. Such a social system would be superior to capitalism only if it involved the great masses of the people in continuing, creative, cooperative, self-critical, and self-disciplined practical and productive activity, only if the people themselves were transformed so that they would naturally and unhesitatingly assume responsibility for decision-making and control over the economic and political development of the country."

"... if the masses have not begun to develop a sense of social responsibility before the seizure of power, the new revolutionary government will, sooner rather than later, find itself confronting disappointed and hostile masses who expect miracles from the new government, and are much less patient with it than they were with the gods."

"This new stage of capitalism had not only made it possible for the capitalists to corrupt a substantial section of the working class inside the advanced countries; it had also created a new revolutionary social force inside the systematically undeveloped countries which would be striving for national liberation."

"The revolution to be made in the United States is not to increase the freedom of individual choice. Rather it is to increase the collective consciousness of how to choose, how to grasp both ends in order to pull forward the middle... The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease, and early death."

"Thus the United States became the only nation in history whose best and brightest minds first led a revolution from colonialism in the name of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all men, and then built a contradiction into their society by explicitly denying human dignity to a quarter of the population they aspired to govern."

"Thus 'that's the law' has become the excuse to evade the contradictions, just as economics has become the excuse to evade social and political issues. Courts, lawyers, prisons, guards, and probation officers proliferate to service the proliferating prisoners produced by the proliferating laws."

"... the United States is now ruled by a Warfare-Welfare State, a state which aims both to satisfy the expanding economic appetites of an increasingly self-interested population and to achieve domination over other powers and other peoples."

"From the very beginning, this nation, and every citizen within it, has been confronted with never-ending choices between economic interests and social justice. Periodically this contradiction has been written into law and deepened by a particular decision, as when the Founding Fathers decided to delete from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence the section condemning slavery and the slave trade."

"At this point, following or staging this scenario is both a farce and a tragedy because of the democratic illusions which it fosters and to sponsor blacks who are victims of U.S. racism, to make political capital of their martyrdom, and then to export them back to the black community as its leaders."

"Today, because of the inseparable development of capitalism and racism, the main contradiction in the United States is the contradiction between its advanced technology and its political backwardness. We are a people who have been psychologically and morally damaged by the unlimited opportunities to pursue material happiness provided by the cancerous growth of the productive forces. As a result, the pursuit of happiness for most Americans means the rejection of the pain of responsibility and learning which is inseparable from human growth. Liberty has turned into license. Equality has become the homogenization of everybody at the lowest common denominator of the faceless anybody. Fraternity has become mass-man cheering and groaning at the various modern spectacles - sports, lotteries, and television give-aways."

"In an advanced country a fundamental distinction has to be made between wants and needs, and people must be brought to understand the necessity to choose between them."

"For example, we will have to discover how to give up or to deny ourselves a lot of things before we can become related to nature again."

"Everyone who rejects society doesn't thereby become revolutionary. Some of these rejecters turn to banditry, thuggery, and some just plain cop-out. For example, what was the objective of the mass assembly of five hundred thousand people at Woodstock? Were they advancing humanity or was it just mass self-indulgence?"

"The point is that when you have a serious idea of where you are going, the number of people that you can hope to recruit either as cadre members or as supporters is very much greater than most potential revolutionaries believe."

"At the other pole, those who have adjusted successfully to the society have done so only because they have accepted the dominant philosophy of our society, that one should strive to get as much for oneself as one can, regardless of anyone else, and that one's life should be organized around that purpose. Go to school so that you can get a better job and earn more. Cater to those in the upper echelons because they may be able to help you get a better job. Go on strike so that you can make more money - no matter what you are producing or what it means to the community. According to this philosophy, government exists only to secure everybody the opportunity to live this way, and the best government is that which provides the most effective umbrella for this kind of life."

"These problems cannot be solved by technology, any more than the war in Indochina could be won by technology. In fact, the application of technology to human relations only introduces more distance into these relations and encourages people to treat each other like things. Human relations can only be changed by human beings who have brought about a fundamental change in the view they have of themselves and of other human beings."

"By what concept of politics have the American people guided themselves that they could accept such a childlike, such a diminished human role for themselves all these years? What is politics? What is the appropriate relation between ethics and politics? What is a nation? What is freedom? What is equality? What is truth? And what is the purpose of a constitution? The answers to these questions cannot be found in any dictionary. They have to be created."

"Politics involves citizenship, the responsibility to a particular polity, the creating of governing structures, of plans, of laws, of leadership - whereas ethics deals with one's social relations with friends, family, and associates, irrespective of citizenship. People have engaged in politics and had no ethics; ethical people have not engaged in politics."

"What does unite Americans or what could unite Americans? We must discover a new basis for American nationhood, one that has nothing to do with who came over on the Mayflower."

"However, what the Western individual usually means by freedom is not a particular political movement - from some particular relationship to another relationship. Few people talk about freedom in terms of the freedom to move and to act with people in a certain relationship. They usually talk about freedom as being able to do what they please - the freedom of the individual. They are dissociating the individual from any necessity, from any relatedness, because to the Western individual any relatedness is a kind of restriction. That sense of individual freedom, precisely because it was once such an advanced idea and had so much scope or expression in the United States, has haunted us all. The liberation groups are permeated by it because they are all heirs to this tradition. Today we must supplant this concept of abstract freedom with another concept of freedom that is based upon relation to nature, to other people in society and in the world, to the past and to the future; one based on inter-relationships which are now necessarily a part of our reality, rather than on the illusion of isolated, internal freedom."

"The concept that all truths which deal with human identity are relative and not absolute is indispensable to the revolutionist. In order to make a revolution, you have to discard the notion that anything one has previously regarded as truth about human beings is necessarily true. It is hard to persuade most radicals of this... We tend to speak of ideas as 'only relative' or 'merely relative' implying that what is relative doesn't matter too much because it is not fixed, as if only fixed truths were important."

"We have to reveal people to themselves - and also to discover the people who are different, who are not determined by their conditions, who are resolved not to be shaped by them."

"At this stage the American revolution consists of discovering what American man/woman wants, now that he/she can have the material things. Only then can we tackle the question of how to achieve it. Our job now is to discover what it is that we want beyond the material. What do we want in our relations with ourselves? How do we conceive our human dignity? What do we want in our relations with each other? IT is something beyond the material, but what is it? Now that we can have the material, and know that it isn't enough, what is it that we want? This question is what bothers Americans most; even race relations are an aspect of it. How does American man/woman want to live tomorrow? It doesn't have to have anything to do with how we lived yesterday."

"Unless there is a revolution in the United States, the United States isn't safe for the world. But the Indochinese can't make the United States revolution. Americans have to make it. In that sense the revolutionary struggle in the United States takes priority over all other struggles."

"Today the huge scale of operations, the destructiveness and wastefulness of so much that is produced, all make it difficult to see one's activity as part of a meaningful whole."

"Positions are a means whereby we get an individual to confront him/herself, to begin to define his/her humanity; whereby we force a person, through ideas, to act rather than just to complain. We take a position in order to force a person to take a position, and thereby to take some responsibility for his/her positions. In other words, we establish a framework within which he/she can grapple with him/herself."

"Many people want to shift the blame for our shame to the military-industrial complex. But the greed of the American people for material goods far in excess of what they need is what has provided the energy, the fuel, for the military-industrial complex. The apparatus is the external cause. The greed of the American people is the internal cause. It is this internal cause which each has to examine and replace with another more human identity."