“It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts.”

– Buenaventura Durruti

I’m leafing through Rudolf Rocker’s Anarcho-Syndicalism. Theory and Practice. Lately I have found myself more hardened in my own political positions, but also deeply disillusioned by the state of discourse to which I am exposed. Best to go back to original sources, I tell myself.

Our society, its culture and the individuals that go about their daily lives seem dismally distant from a state of consciousness capable of diagnosing our disease. We all stumble around mumbling and grumbling but in the end everyone grovels at the ballot box. One of these elites–and even Gov. Perry qualifies–will save us from the desecration, the horror of Obama. Such idiocy beggars the mind. But you all know that already.

The MSM snidely decries the echo-chamber of the blogosphere while denying that their own voices are reverberating inside a corporately constructed, for-profit Department of Truth.

Señor Durruti brings me a bit of hope as we approach America’s holiday for workers. He died fighting fascists in Spain, leading a column of anarchists. Would that I could live to walk among the ruins.

From Jack’s letter to Progressives :

No politics matters. Because there is no “the People.” They aren’t out there, waiting to give their holy Consent to the men in white hats. Or to the ladies in white hats, if that’s your primary criteria.

“No politics matters.”

When you get that point it’s like waking up with an existential hangover. We stumble bleary eyed into the blazing sun, with head pounding, our tongues dry from years of pointless chatter about this or that issue. The world is now a menacing and conspiratorial foe completely compromised. The ground wobbles. We fall to our knees and purge the propaganda from our insides in violent fits of intellectual vomit. Falling on our backs, flat on our backs, we ask ourselves, “Now what?”

The urge to do violence to the lie grows. It expresses itself in spastic outbursts of contempt.

No point attacking what doesn’t matter. For my part I will target the culture, without which the state in its present form could not exist. And without a cultural revolution (yeah, I’m aware of historical reference) the state will persist, humanity will diminish and the species will continue its gradual progression to extinction.

Not my end, silly.

The end of this culture. Let it all come crashing down. How best to bring it’s demise? (To call it culture is to give it too much credit). I now live in a house in a suburb of a sprawling disaster of human sprawl. How did this happen? I lost my income. I moved back to a place that I swore I would never live in again, to work in a job that I never imagined would have to do, to rely on family with whom I share no values, to do what I must, to take care of my children, but to what end?

To put them in schools that compete with the best that “free-enterprise” can offer: charter fucking schools that live like parasites upon the community?

What kind of world would we armchair anarchists give the future? Are we so confident in human nature?

What is the alternative? Utopian lies? Socialist fantasies?

Change the culture first. Change how we think, and the political shit will follow.