roachboy

revolutions do not simply happen---they involve (and express) a political vision of an alternate arrangement---if you can say that the history of the political left came out of the french revolution without repeating it, the difference lay in the understanding that the french revolution effectively ate itself, that what motored this eating of itself was a series of groups which came to power each of which claimed to locate or embody the revolution.

in the present, there is no coherent viewpoint that looks forward. there is no revolutionary politics. there is not even a coherent notion of what revolution might mean. such is the pulverized state of affairs which confronts folk who see in the existing order mostly a farce, a brutal, tragic idiotic farce and imagine that the only way forward is forward.
there are legion viewpoints that run away from the present: to reinforce this very american tendency to substitute past for present, there are many options, most one or another variant of hyper-nationalism, more therefore one or another variant of fascism--some heavier, some more lite.

i see more a process of structural breakdown coming with a main experiential correlate in a sense of suffocation: the inhabitants of a building watch television footage of their building burning so they can "know what's happening"
mediated in this fashion, the present is already the past.
mediated in this fashion, there's no possibility of radically altering what is because (a) the features of the existing order which are ideological are collapsed onto features of objects in the world because there is no making of the world, only a reception.
mediated in this fashion, the present is already the past.
the room is taped shut: windows locked, doors bolted.
we'll sit in chairs until the smoke comes and we drift off to sleep.

so people prefer incremental change because they see on television and read in the papers that incremental change is change itself. if they believe that, then it's true, yes?

incremental change in a situation of incoherence gets you what exactly?

well, it's hard to say, isn't it?
but the reverse, which is refusing even that, seems a bad idea: we have the history of the ideological war on america waged by the right since the late 1970s to demonstrate that.

if there's to be a more radical possibility, it has to be built.
building that possibility is not going to happen on a messageboard.
this is not the world.
this is a fragment of the world.

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i am not surprised that biden is obama's running mate.
despite everything said above, i think obama is preferable to another republican administration. maybe it's no more than prefering a slower mounting of smoke in the room to a faster one.
but there is the possibility that the present is open, that the future can be otherwise, and that on it's own makes me think that slower mounting smoke is preferable.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite