Month: May 2008

Field Guide to Revolution

An Imaginative Epic
or Novel of Ideas, New Novel
or Fictive Essay
inspired in part by
popular will and liberatory tendencies
and by
The U.S. Military Counterinsurgency Manual, December 2006

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Also see: Declaration of Emancipation
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FIELD GUIDE TO REVOLUTION

LIBERATORY REVOLUTION
For Public Release – Distribution Unlimited
COUNCIL IN THE AMERICAS FOR LIBERATORY REVOLUTION

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FOREWORD

This field guide for liberation is designed to fill a revolutionary gap. It has been too long since the Americas have had at hand a sweeping manual for liberation. With the people fighting corporate and state governments and other counterrevolutionary (CORE) entities and forces throughout the hemisphere, and world, it is essential that we, the peoples of the Americas, conceive and distribute a handbook that provides principles and guidelines for liberatory revolution (LIBREV) throughout the Americas, and beyond. Such guidance must be grounded in historical studies. However, it also must be informed by contemporary experiences. And imaginative work.

This manual takes a general approach to liberation and revolution, in describing LIBREV operations against the mendacious and malicious entities that are counterrevolutionary, or CORE, forces. The people recognize that every struggle for liberty is contextual and presents its own set of challenges. We cannot fight current corporate and state tyranny, whether of neoliberal, neoconservative, or other tendencies, the exact way we fought Nazis, Stalinists, corporate-state and other CORE forces of the past. The application of principles and fundamentals to deal with any of these inevitably varies. Nonetheless, all mendacious entities, all CORE forces, even today’s highly adaptable corporate-state strains, remain essentially wars against the people. They use variations of standard themes and adhere to elements of a recognizable reactionary or oppressive status quo campaign plan, tending to utter despotism.

This manual therefore addresses the common characteristics of these mendacious entities, these counterrevolutionary forces. It strives to provide those conducting LIBREV campaigns with a solid foundation for understanding and addressing specific counterrevolutionary forces. A liberatory revolutionary campaign is, as described in this manual, a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations conducted along multiple lines of operations. It requires revolutionaries to employ a mix of familiar actions and skills often associated with effective popular liberatory movements and with genuinely free, just, and equitable societies wherever they have appeared in some part. Continue reading Field Guide to Revolution

Declaration of Emancipation

(compare to the Declaration of Independence)

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for people to dissolve the political and legal bonds which have connected them with others, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the free and equal station to which the laws of nature entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of people everywhere requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to liberty.

We Americans – we peoples of the Americas – from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow and every point in between – hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life and liberty, as well as just and equitable conditions of life. That whenever any form of government – be it corporate or statist or otherwise – becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute various forms of democracy and free association that function to secure these inalienable rights, and that work to create a flourishing and relative equality of condition, without which these inalienable rights can neither be met nor fulfilled. When a long train of abuses and usurpations designs to oppress people under various forms of despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off corporate and state governments and other oppressors, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the people of the Americas, and beyond; and such is now their need to alter the oppressive systems of corporate and state authoritarianism and malicious neglect. The history of the present corporate-state systems of rule is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an intolerable tyranny over the people. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. Continue reading Declaration of Emancipation

Comics, cartoons, graphic novels and social change

Preston C. Enright:

“Having recently seen author David Hajdu on C-SPAN, I was motivated to create this list of artists who are dealing with complex issues in a way that super-hero comics never did. Hajdu, the author of ‘The Ten-Cent Plague’ outlined the history of the repression of comics in America, including a decade (1945-1955) when comics were being publicly burned. Today, there is a renaissance of thoughtful illustrators who are thinking outside the box. There is also an increased interest in the ‘underground’ comics of the 60s and 70s. I’m looking forward to watching this field develop in the coming years.”

Hollywood Betrays Oil!, Upton Sinclair, Workers

David Bacon:

I was disappointed that Daniel Day- Lewis won an Oscar for There Will Be Blood, not because he’s not a great actor (he is), but because the movie was such a betrayal of the book on which it was based. Movies don‘t have to follow books. Many don‘t. But in this case, what we missed were the things that made Upton Sinclair’s Oil! a politically courageous book for its time. For our time, it unearths a crucial part of the hidden history of our own working class movement. 

PEN and Public or Political Fiction

PEN asks: “…what novels were ever pointedly relevant to public and political life?”

No little bit of research and analysis on it. One could do worse than to recall Victor Hugo’s great novel of the people, Les Miserables. Biographer Graham Robb notes:

“One can see here the impact of Les Miserables on the Second Empire…. The State was trying to clear its name. The Emperor and Empress performed some public acts of charity and brought philanthropy back into fashion. There was a sudden surge of official interest in penal legislation, the industrial exploitation of women, the care of orphans, and the education of the poor. From his rock in the English Channel, Victor Hugo, who can more fairly be called ‘the French Dickens’ than Balzac, had set the parliamentary agenda for 1862.” 

Unfortunately, there’s the tremendous influence of reactionary novels such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:

Since it’s publication in 1957, Atlas Shrugged, the philosophical and artistic climax of Ayn Rand’s novels, has never been out of print. It continues to receive critical attention and is considered one of the most influential books ever published, impacting a variety of disciplines including philosophy, literature, economics, business and political science. Continue reading PEN and Public or Political Fiction

Dear Jonathan Franzen

 – open letter –

Send us the money. We know what to do with it.

As reported in the Harvard Crimson, you noted that “many writers have been in a post-Sept. 11 malaise, and that it grew so severe that at one point [you] considered offering up [your] own money in order to urge writers to break through their writer’s block.”

You state, “I actually had an idea a couple of years ago – when six or seven people I knew were all in a similar place of frustration with the novel – of sponsoring a prize, of offering $10,000 of my own money who first delivered a novel.”

Within two or three years of 9-11 both Andre Vltchek and I had written geo-political novels that no publisher would touch – too progressive for the status quo literary world. We lacked the malaise but could have won your $10,000, which would have helped us greatly in starting up Mainstay Press and its journal Liberation Lit as a way of publishing our work and the accomplished literature and art of others that the status quo lit world shies from. $10,000 would still greatly help us publish the first print issue of our liberatory literature journal Liberation Lit, featuring several dozen authors. As it is we will be hard pressed just to get contributor’s copies to some of the contributors. So substantial financial help would be much appreciated. Our post 9-11, post Iraq war, post Hurricane Katrina novels and numerous other works both long and short show that we have surely and consistently produced, and know what to do with the money.

We do most everything. We write novels, plays, stories, and works of criticism, and we edit them and those by others, and we proof them, and format them, and design and create the covers, and publish them, and attempt to publicize them. And since we do it with next to no resources, you can trust that we know how to stretch a dollar. Continue reading Dear Jonathan Franzen