by QMS, March 28, 2014
With thanks to:
Frantz Fanon, Maria Mies, Bruce Lee, Marx and Engels, Silvia Federici,
George Jackson, Claudia von Werlhof, Mao Zedong, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joel Kovel, Fred Ho,
Russell Maroon Shoatz, John Clark, Black Elk, Subcommandante Marcos and the
EZLN, Max Stanford, the Haudenosaunee nation, and to everyone who participated in the
2014 scientific soul study group.
To know fire,
get burned.
To know water,
experience drowning.
What is the
ratio of concepts in your head to calluses on your hands?
Think about it
now, while there's time to think.
Grasp the
purpose of science in the crunch of chaos,
Like you realize
the soul in knowing a death.
Know your enemy,
know yourself –
Dance the
dialectics and don't drop the beat.
Do not arrive at
revolution lightly,
Or get
shipwrecked on your own shallowness.
Revolution is
the search and rescue of the original instructions:
Discovery of our
nature, our self transformation, our I that is your I.
What will
matriarchy mean on the mass migration from the coastlines?
What will
indigeneity mean when you join the ranks of the massively
incarcerated?
What will
ecosocialism mean when its your hunger and cold versus the ecosystem?
All these things
will come to pass –
Don't ride an
ass in search of an ass!
The cause is not
a slogan, it is a covenant we make in the desert,
Knowing that
life and death are at stake,
Knowing how
little stands between evolution and extinction.
When, and not
if, our first tumors are diagnosed,
We will feel the
gravity of our dreams,
Feel their
weight on the scales of fate,
Make no mistake,
our ideas will be tested,
At the crest of
the crashing wave of history,
This is the
horror and the wonder of our destiny,
The Pachakuti,
the endless beginning or the beginning of the end;
The mission that
our generation will fulfill or betray.
We are not
alone.
Time: the trick
played by modernity to cut us off from the past.
History
is life, and death:
From the first
rape, the second witch hunt, the third colony, the fourth paycheck,
Little by little
we have whittled the tree of life and knowledge
Into toothpicks
for the affluent, barricades for the turbulent, toilet paper for the
flatulent.
History
is death, and life;
Billions of
ancestors promise and deliver on the revolutionary truth
That we can win.
But revolution
is not an event.
It is never won
or lost once and for all.
Every victory is
partial, every defeat is temporary,
Yet in every
moment of freedom,
Every other
freedom is remembered, celebrated, rehearsed, and prefigured.
Prepare to be
attacked from all sides.
Don't turn back
but pick up the slack and grapple with the facts.
But don't just
act. Revolution is deeper –
Deeper than
doing, deeper than proving, deeper than winning or losing.
Revolution is
Being, not just seeing or believing or scheming.
It is the
highest calling of being,
The deepest
interpretation of life's meaning.
It is the vital
thread with which we stitch the quilt of our being.
It is the truth
with no future, the freedom which cannot be preconceived.
If it doesn't
blow your mind it's the wrong kind of revolution, brother,
If it doesn't
encompass the sacred hoop of mother and child,
If it isn't the
call of the wild, beyond postures and styles,
Then it's a lie,
not worthy to learn the secrets of your eyes, sister,
Not worthy of
your kiss.
Our vision of
revolution has to connect the ancient past to the far-flung future:
The councils of
mothers that fought the rise of patriarchy for thousands of years,
The peasants
that preferred to die rather than exchange their labor for a wage,
The spiritual
warriors of Abya Yala who burned before they renounced their beliefs,
The
anti-colonial shamans who prophesied the war of the worlds to come,
The
revolutionary Marxists who made a science of freedom, millions who
led and who followed,
Generations of
guerrillas, dynasties of diggers,
Unwritten and
unrecorded encyclopedias of maroons...
And our children
who will grow up in mass migrations,
Who will fight
in civil wars and work in the factories and plantations of corporate
city states,
Their children
who will fight for meaning amidst mass extinction,
Their children
and their children's children, who will join it or overcome it.
From male
hunting groups to kingdoms to corporate executive boards to drones
and GMOs and bulldozed homes,
One struggle,
one vision, one practice, one prophecy:
We can find it
in the unity between our immediate needs and our fundamental
fantasies.
Find it in the
tiger's den, in the personal struggle, in the general strike,
And in the moon
reflected in the river.
Find it in
birdsong and big bands, in poisoned oceans and tar sands,
In ancestral
lands and in your two hands,
Find the elation
in the negation of the negation –
Because
revolution is the way station between this world and the next,
So in the
silence between your breaths, test yourself,
Against lies and
illusions –
And study the
solutions!
Because if you
really mean revolution,
There are no
foregone conclusions.
