“Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy’s rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element cannot live.”    

Mao Zedong

*****

“The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”           

Finley Peter Dunne

*****

“Falter not. Lay bare the inequalities of capitalism; expose the slavery of law; proclaim the tyranny of government; denounce the greed, cruelty, abominations of the privileged class who riot and revel on the labor of their wage-slaves.”    

Albert Parsons, Haymarket Martyr

*****

“The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system, it must go.”

“Revolution is never practical–until the hour of the Revolution strikes.  Then it alone is practical, and all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers become the most futile and visionary of human imaginings.”

” . . . revolutions are not the product of our brains, but of ripe material conditions.”   

James Connolly, Irish Revolutionary

*****

“Revolutionaries sometimes try to prove that the crisis is absolutely insoluble. This is a mistake. There is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation. The bourgeoisie are behaving like barefaced plunderers who have lost their heads; they are committing folly after folly, thus aggravating the situation and hastening their doom. All that is true. But nobody can ‘prove’ that it is absolutely impossible for them to pacify a minority of the exploited with some petty concessions, and suppress some movement or uprising of some section of the oppressed and exploited. To try to ‘prove’ in advance that there is ‘absolutely’ no way out of the situation would be sheer pedantry, or playing with concepts and catchwords.”  

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Radical “Moments”/Ruling Class Reform/Dissent Inside Capitalism/Radicals and Reformers 

Agrarian Revolutions, Nationalism, and Socialism

Bolsheviks, Chi Coms, Viet Minh,  Castro, EZLN

(Outside forces: Great War, Japanese aggression/Occupation, World War II, Cold War, NAFTA)

       “Thoi Co” (the Opportune Moment)

Ireland 1916, Northern Korea, ANC

 

 

 

 

 

American Rebellions

Who Should Rule at Home?

       Bacon and other Colonial Uprisings

       Paxton Boys and Regulators

       Shays and Whiskey Rebellions

       Slave Uprisings (Class Consciousness and the Origins of Racism)

       Dorr Rebellion

 

Class Wars and the Persistence of the Capitalist Regime

From the Great Uprising to Ludlow: Class Consciousness/Struggle, Socialism, Anarchy

 

(Haymarket, Homestead, Pullman, Bread and Roses, “Wobblies”)

 IWW Class Pyramid

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Populists: Banks and Railroads

Red Scares, the Seattle Strike, West Virginia Coal Wars

 

 

 

 

 

 

Depresssion Radicalism: “Pop Culture” resistance: Jolly Bankers, Pretty Boy Floyd, Who Do We Shoot?

Upton Sinclair and Huey Long: Share Our Wealth

Little Steel Strikes: Depression and WW II

The Beats, Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild One, and Cultural Resistance

Militancy in the ’60s: SNCC, SDS, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, VVAW, Poor Peoples’ Campaign, Women’s Liberation

The End of Class Struggle?

 Military Keynesianism and McCarthyism

Protest within Capitalist Framework (e.g. Civil Rights, Marriage Equality)

Culture and Identity

21st Century: Green is the New Red/Battle of Seattle/OWS/BLM/Climate Change/DAPL

Ruling Class Fissures, but the Persistence of the Old Regime

The Obama Coma and the Trump Awakening

Capitalist Strategies: Force, Money, Courts, Media, Division

“Failure” of The American Left:  No Socialist/Labor Party, Cultural Hegemony, Commodification, Little history of political violence, and LIBERALS