Some Fragments of a Call

The revolution will not be mundane, but revolutionary consciousness is essentially an acute perception of the mundane. There is no revolutionary form except that of so-called reality; openness to the way things are is sufficient cause for a desire to change the way they are. (If you want proof of this, consider these words my testimony.)

How do we begin again to desire a new reality? We must recognize that pernicious privilege is the fundamental defect of human social formations. We must be willing to periodically dissolve our selves in as inclusive a collective as we are able to imagine. Borrowing Huey P. Newton's term, we call this revolutionary suicide.

The revolution will emerge in the union of actual and virtual communities organized on the basis of a principle of systemic eudaimonia, or flourishing. To oppose structural oppressions in thought and action is to live the revolution, for the revolution. The fundamental mode of revolutionary existence is hunger.

Glauber Rocha writes of Cinema Novo in "An Esthetic of Hunger" (1965), "We know--since we made these sad, ugly films, these screaming, desperate films where reason does not always prevail--that this hunger will not be cured by moderate governmental reforms and that the cloak of Technicolor cannot hide, but only aggravates, its tumors. Therefore, only a culture of hunger, weakening its own structures, can surpass itself qualitatively; the most noble cultural manifestation of hunger is violence."

When my parents make a point of talking about killing animals, they talk about the necessity for their grandparents of "putting food on the table." How can I learn to address necessity to people who talk about poverty without any reference to class? How can I explain the necessity of empowering violence--that is, self-defense or other-defense--to people who take so lightly unnecessary, mediated violence against nonhuman animals?

Sometimes the future itself appears as an intellectual property of the oppressor. The underprivileged are compelled to deliver up for destruction their aspirations and commitments. Revolutionary violence is a calculated disruption of property and an impassioned resistance to future oppression.