Tag: power
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Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals
At long last, my book… “A powerful, rigorous, and clear-eyed guide to building social justice movements.” —Publishers Weekly “As the world faces the horrors of a Trump presidency, many good people are asking, ‘What can I do?’ Jonathan Smucker’s book provides an urgent field manual for answering that question.” —Jeremy Scahill author of Blackwater and Dirty…
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“Power concedes nothing without a demand.” #BaltimoreUprising
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one,…
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Not enough lifeboats
You cannot take even one breath without manipulating the common fabric of material existence. Everything manipulates everything else. Every action shifts the ground upon which everything else is built. There is no such thing as a fully autonomous project. The question is not whether but how to manipulate. How will you step into responsibility to…
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Power and self-selection
He who is active in politics strives for power either as a means in serving other aims, ideal or egoistic, or as ‘power for power’s sake,’ that is, in order to enjoy the prestige-feeling that power gives. —Max Weber The “crisis of our times” is that those driven by ideals and those driven by ‘power…
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“Counter-hegemony” and Left Ambivalence Toward Power
I’m reading Cihan Tuğal’s Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. I’m still working my way through it, but so far I’ve found it very insightful. There are so many things in the book that I’m looking forward to digging into, so I feel a little bad that I’m about to start with the…
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Left-wing ambivalence toward power
There’s no shortage of reasons to be ambivalent toward power. A cursory glance at the 20th Century should cause serious wariness — at the very least toward some of the horrible ways power can be wielded. This wariness, though, is asymmetrical between the political Left and Right — as are its consequences. And I believe this…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 