The Rebellion Of The Masses Quotes

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

The very concept of "revolutionary violence" is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like.

Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe. The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague. In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the "cogito" in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel—therefore we exist.

Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand [...] The great millions of Africa, and of Asia, have grown impatient of being hewers of wood and drawers of water, and are rebelling against the false belief that providence created some to be menials of others. Hence the twentieth century has become the century of colonial emancipation, the century of continuing revolution which must finally witness the total liberation of Africa from colonial rule and imperialist exploitation.

If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time. Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")

From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.

Our uprising is against a cultural mind-set that twists the purpose and potential of the teen years and threatens to cripple our generation. Our uprising won’t be marked by mass riots and violence, but by millions of individual teens quietly choosing to turn the low expectations of our culture upside down.

And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.

I tell you," said Augustine, "if there is anything that revealed with the strength of a divine law in our times, it is that the masses are to rise, and the under class becomes the upper one.

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; the must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions, beside political rebellions, ferment in the masses of life which people earth.

All you have to do is work hard, obey the rules, and believe in yourself. This myth is disseminated across the political spectrum. It is the essential message peddled by everyone from Oprah and the entertainment industry to the Christian Right and positive psychologists. But this promise, as the masses of underemployed and unemployed are discovering, is a fiction.16

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold,or do not hold, is looked on as matter of indifference. They can me granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

The central government was a despotism tempered by military rebellion and assassination and replacement of one scurvy lot of ruling dynasts by another. But the high politics of the city of Rome little affected the lives of the masses or even of the provincial nobility. It was the wonderful army that provided the continuity and peace that this vast population enjoyed.

We hear the expression, Vox populi, vox Dei, that is, the voice of the people is the voice of God. There are a lot of people in America who believe that. They consider public opinion as the authority. However, the mass of people is a fickle crowd that will follow one TV personality after another. It will elect a man to office if he has charisma even though he may be the biggest fool in the world and utterly corrupt in his life. The voice of the people is the very worst basis for authority. I thank God that He is not going to let the world vote the Lord Jesus into office! If God were to put it up to a public vote, Jesus Christ would never enter into His kingdom. I rejoice that God will send the Lord Jesus to this earth to put down rebellion.

Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.

Hqve you never heard of priests proclaim that the meek will inherit the earth and wondered if kings of old didn't smile to hear it? Your reward comes after death. Nirvana. The wheel of life turns and we are elevated from animals to women, from women to men, from men to kings, from kings to gods, from gods to... perfection. And what is perfection now? Not crucifixion, not poverty endured patiently on the mountaintop. No--the perfect life is to have an annual salary of £120,000, an Aston Martin, a £1.6million-pound home, a wife, two children and at least two foreign holidays a year. Perfection is an idol built upon oppression. Perfection is the heaven that kept the masses suppressed; the promise of a future life that quells rebellion. Perfection is the self-hatred an overweight woman feels when she sees a slim model on TV; perfection is the resentment the well-paid man experiences when he beholds a miserable billionaire. Perfection kills. Perfection destroys the soul.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.  Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot.  Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.  Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.  It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Though, when I'm proven wrong and the underprivileged masses storm my palace and burn me at the stake, I'll be sure to inform them that you were right all along. You'll get the last laugh. Or...well, the last scream, since you'll probably be tied up beside me.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a bitter satire of Soviet life at the height of Stalin’s purges, captured the surreal experience of living in the embrace of totalitarianism. Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious. Existence is a dark carnival of opportunism, unchecked state power, hedonism, and terror. Omnipotent secret police, wholesale spying and surveillance, show trials, censorship, mass arrests, summary executions, and disappearances, along with famines, gulags, and a state system of propaganda unplugged from daily reality, give to all totalitarian systems a dreamlike quality.

He was struck by how much it differed from his mother’s descriptions, and from the photos he’d seen growing up. Gone were the dust-choked streets. Gone were the ramshackle shanties overflowing into those same streets. And gone, too, were what his uncle once called “the inconvenient and combustible masses prone to rebellion.

It is in vain to say human beings are to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.

Yet alongside this rebellion against the father, a respect for and acceptance of his authority continued to exist. This ambivalent attitude toward authority—rebellion against it coupled with acceptance and submission—is a basic feature of every middle-class structure from the age of puberty to full adulthood and is especially pronounced in individuals stemming from materially restricted circumstances.

Insurrections, rioting, mass expropriations, occupations, and all sorts of unimaginable forms of class warfare are not only inevitable but also are taking place all over with more frequency and veraciousness as the crisis that is capitalism deepens. It is crystal clear that the deprived, exploited, and violated have organized, and will continue to do so, formally and informally, to the demise of their oppressors, those who remain neutral, or each other. The side of history on which we find ourselves is not determined by whether or not we share the experiences of one horror or another, or how we individually identify, but instead on our own resolution to see the end of each of these miseries that perpetuate this racist, capitalist, shit show called society. We Are All Oscar Grant(?): Attacking White Supremacy in the Rebellions and Beyond

Where is the great social movement in the streets that will help support and strengthen our demand for trans liberation? Will we see it in our lifetime? No crystal ball exists to predict mass awakening. But laws of motion and development do exist: Repression breeds resistance. That's the lesson of Stonewall. And remember what Sylvia Rivera said about that rebellion? 'I always believed that we would have a fight back. I just didn't know it would be that night.

The emergent Church is the latest act in the wave of antimodernist revolt by liturgical renewal and charismatic revival, a rebellion whose central insight is that rationalistic fundamentalism, as much as liberalism, is a mass of worldly accretions. The historical record and human feeling, not the illusion of inerrancy, are supposed to command authority in the post-Christian age. Yet American evangelicals' craving for clear authority is second only to their refusal to let any authority boss them around. Skeptics note that the Emergent Church is a movement of quintessentially evangelical individualists. 'By constantly appealing to the "capital T" Tradition, and then in effect picking and choosing from its offerings, they do not succeed in living out any of the traditions that flow from the Tradition, but create their own eclectic, ad hod churchmanship,' wrote D.A. Carson, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. 'It is controlled by what these emerging thinkers judge to be appropriate in the postmodern world - and this results, rather ironically, in one of the most self-serving appeals to tradition I have ever seen.

As the rules of acceptable discourse changed, however, segregationists distanced themselves from an explicitly racist agenda. they developed instead the racially sanitized rhetoric of cracking down on crime rhetoric that is now freely used by politicians of every stripe. Conservative politicians who embraced this rhetoric purposely failed to distinguish between the direct action tactics of civil rights activists, violent rebellion to the inner cities, And traditional crimes of an economic or violent nature. Instead, as Marc Mauer of the sentencing project has noted, "all of this phenomenon or subsumed under the heading of "crime in the streets.

Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

From the woods that surrounded the burgh came a mass of men. Some rode, others ran. All carried weapons, mainly axes or spears. A few wore mail shirts and cloaks, but most just leather aketons. Among them were a handful of men clad in the short tunics favoured by Highlanders. These men were bare from thigh to foot, an alarming sight to Ormesby, who had only heard rumour of these wild men of the north. As they came, they roared a multitude of battle cries. Ormesby caught one name in the din, issuing from a group of mailed riders who followed a burly man on a finely caparisoned horse. ‘For Douglas!’ they howled. ‘For Douglas!’ Below, the townsfolk were scattering. The English soldiers had formed a tight knot outside the hall, blades drawn, but even as Ormesby watched, the forlorn group of beggars he had seen threw off their ragged skins and furs, revealing thickly muscled warriors. They fell upon the soldiers with savage cries, daggers thrusting. Footsteps sounded on the hall stairs. The door burst open and two soldiers appeared. ‘We must go, sir!’ The clerks and officials were already hastening across the chamber. Donald was running with them. Ormesby remained rooted. ‘Who are they?’ he demanded, his voice high as he turned back to the window, seeing the horde rushing into the town. His eyes fixed on a giant of a man running, almost loping in the front lines. Taller than all those around him, agile in the stride, he wore a simple dark blue tunic and wide-brimmed kettle hat. The other men seemed to be running in unruly formation around him. But it was the blade in the man’s hands that Ormesby’s eyes were drawn to. He had never seen such a sword, so broad and long the giant had to grasp it in both hands as he came. Another name now became audible in the roar of the mob. ‘Wallace! Wallace!

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Jesus in the Temple of God in Jerusalem Matthew 21 12: AND JESUS WENT INTO THE TEMPLE OF GOD, AND CAST OUT ALL THEM THAT SOLD AND BOUGHT IN THE TEMPLE, AND OVERTHROW THE TABLES OF THE MONEY-CHANGERS, AND THE SEATS OF THEM THAT SOLD DOVES Rebellion is individual. It comes out of the truth of one being. Revolutions are organized, but you can not organize a rebellion. Revolutions becomes establishment, and then they fail. Rebellion comes out of the truth and authenticity of one being's heart. Revolution is organized and political, rebellion is spiritual. A revolution is of the future, rebellion is here and now. In revolution, you try to change others, in rebellion you change yourself. Jesus is a rebel. Christianity is the organized religion, which appeared after Jesus was murdered. Christianity is established by the same establishment that Jesus rebelled against. Jesus is a rebel, who lived out of his own love, truth and understanding. AND HE SAID TO THEM, IT IS WRITTEN, MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED THE HOUSE OF PRAYER Jesus entered the temple of God in Jerusalem, and saw that the temple had been destryed. It was not a house of prayer. People were not meditating, people were not praying. The temple was no longer the abode of God. Priests have always been against God. The talk about God, but they are basically against God. They do not teach truth. The temple of God in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the priests. Christianity is based on one simple word: love. But the result of Christianity is wars, murder and crusades. The priests go on talking about love, but he does not live in love. AND HE SAID UNTO THEM, IT IS WRITTEN, MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED THE HOUSE OF PRAYER; BUT YE HAVE MADE IT A DEN OF THIEVES Jesus says that the temple of God, is not longer a house of prayer. It is a house of thieves. AND WHEN HE WAS COME INTO THE TEMPLE, THE CHIEF PRIESTS AND THE ELDERS OF THE PEOPLE CAME UNTO HIM AS HE WAS TEACHING AND SAID, BY WHAT AUTHORITY DOES THOU THESE THINGS? AND WHO GAVE THEE THIS AUTHORITY? Organized religion always asks about authority, status, as if truth needs some authority, some licensing from the outside. The priests talks the language of the establishment, even while meeting a mystic like Jesus. Truth arises from your own being, this is the inner authority. Truth is born out of your own being. The priests asks Jesus who has given him the authority to overthrow the tables of the money-changers? Who has given him the authority to change the rules of the temple? But Jesus did not answer the priests. He remained silent. Jesus is his own authority. Jesus whole message is to be your own authority. You are not here to follow anybody. You are here to be yourself. Your life is yours. Your love is your inner being. The priests wanted to arrest Jesus and throw him into prison, but they were afraid of the masses of people who listened to Jesus. They had to wait for the right moment to arrest him. The authentic mystic is always a danger to the priests and the organized religion. When you can allow the yes to be born in you, there is no need to go to a temple. Then God desends in you. Whenever a man is ready, God finds him.

Cruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile thing; but cruelty to a man is not cruelty, it is treason. Tyranny over a man is not tyranny, it is rebellion, for man is royal. Now, the practical weakness of the vast mass of modern pity for the poor and the oppressed is precisely that it is merely pity; the pity is pitiful, but not respectful. Men feel that the cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is injustice to equals; nay, it is treachery to comrades. This dark scientific pity, this brutal pity, has an elemental sincerity of its own; but it is entirely useless for all ends of social reform. Democracy swept Europe with the sabre when it was founded upon the Rights of Man. It has done literally nothing at all since it has been founded only upon the wrongs of man. Or, more strictly speaking, its recent failure has been due to its not admitting the existence of any rights, or wrongs, or indeed of any humanity. Evolution (the sinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man. And all the despair about the poor, and the cold and repugnant pity for them, has been largely due to the vague sense that they have literally relapsed into the state of the lower animals.

The Soviet collapse in 1989 was even more peaceful, despite the eruption of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Never before has such a mighty empire disappeared so swiftly and so quietly. The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale Martin Luther King-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and aeroplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humankind several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would have opened fire on the subjugated masses. Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home. Gorbachev and his colleagues gave up without a struggle not only the Soviet conquests of World War Two, but also the much older tsarist conquests in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership – or like the French in Algeria.

This, then, was the Old World on the eve of Columbus’s departure in 1492. For almost half a millennium Christians had been launching hideously destructive holy wars and massive enslavement campaigns against external enemies they viewed as carnal demons and described as infidels—all in an effort to recapture the Holy Land, and all of which, it now seemed to many, effectively had come to naught. During those same long centuries they had further expressed their ruthless intolerance of all persons and things that were non-Christian by conducting pogroms against the Jews who lived among them and whom they regarded as the embodiment of Antichrist—imposing torture, exile, and mass destruction on those who refused to succumb to evangelical persuasion. These great efforts, too, appeared to have largely failed. Hundreds of thousands of openly practicing Jews remained in the Europeans’ midst, and even those who had converted were suspected of being the Devil’s agents and spies, treacherously boring from within. Dominated by a theocratic culture and world view that for a thousand years and more had been obsessed with things sensual and sexual, and had demonstrated its obsession in the only way its priesthood permitted—by intense and violent sensual and sexual repression and “purification”—the religious mood of Christendom’s people at this moment was near the boiling point. At its head the Church was mired in corruption, while the ranks below were dispirited and increasingly disillusioned. These are the sorts of conditions that, given the proper spark, lend themselves to what anthropologists and historians describe as “millenarian” rebellion and upheaval, or “revitalization movements.”125

The slave protests against the condition of his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the human condition in general. The rebel slave affirms that there is something in him which will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe. For both of them it is not only a problem of pure and simple negation. In fact in both cases we find an assessment of values in the name of which the rebel refuses to accept the condition in which he finds himself. The slave who opposes his master is not concerned, let us note, with repudiating his master as a human being. He is repudiating him as master. He denies his right to deny him, as a slave, by making excessive demands. The master fails to the extent that he does not respond to a demand that he ignores. If men cannot refer to common values, which they all separately recognize, then man is incomprehensible to man. The rebel demands that these values should be clearly recognized as part of himself because he knows or suspects that, without them, crime and disorder would reign in the world. An act of rebellion seems to him like a demand for clarity and unity. The most elementary rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order. This description can be applied, word for word, to the metaphysical rebel. He attacks a shattered world to make it whole. He confronts the injustice at large in the world with his own principles of justice. Thus all he originally wants is to resolve this contradiction and establish a reign of justice, if he can, or of injustice if he is driven to the end of his tether. Meanwhile he denounces the contradiction. Metaphysical rebellion is the justified claim of a desire for unity against the suffering of life and death – in that it protests against the incompleteness of human life, expressed by death, and its dispersion, expressed by evil. If a mass death sentence defines man’s condition, then rebellion, in one sense, is its contemporary.

he used the phrase “naive transitivity” to describe what we and other movement activists in the 1960s were calling “rebellion.” For Freire, it was the stage when the masses, conscious that their oppression is rooted in objective conditions, “become anxious for freedom, anxious to overcome the silence in which they have always existed.” Freire was very clear, as were we, that this breaking of silence was not just a riot. Indeed, the masses were seeking to make their historical presence felt. He was equally clear, as were we, that it was not yet revolution because revolutions are made by people (as distinguished from masses) who have assumed “the role of subject in the precarious adventure of transforming and re-creating the world. They are not just denouncing but also announcing a new positive.”8 Or as we put it in Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, “a rebellion disrupts the society,” but “a revolution . . . begins with projecting the notion of a more human, human being,” one “who is more advanced in the qualities which only human beings have—creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.”9 Soon thereafter, I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and was delighted to discover that his ideas of Education for Freedom, as education that not only makes the masses conscious of their oppression but engages them in struggles to transform themselves and their world, were very close to those that I had been putting forward.10 In this landmark work, Freire critiqued the bourgeois “banking method” of education, in which students are expected to memorize the “truths” of the dominant society—that is, “deposit” information in their head then “withdraw” it when required for tests, jobs, and other demands by overseers. Instead, Freire argued that critical thinking can develop only when questions are posed as problems. This problem-posing method provides no automatic “correct” answer. By contrast, students must discover their own understanding of the truth by developing a heightened awareness of their situation.

If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society. Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress. Property, the dominion of man's needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, "Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!" The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead. "Property is robbery," said the great French Anarchist, Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand a hundredfold. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey. It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson. Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.

Mass Mobilization of Youth Despite the well-founded dissatisfaction of the younger generation with the kind of life offered by the bloated affluence of megatechnic society, their very mode of rebellion too often demonstrates that the power system still has them in its grip: they, too mistake indolence for leisure and irresponsibility for liberation. The so-called Woodstock Festival was no spontaneous manifestation of joyous youth, but a strictly money-making enterprise, shrewdly calculated to exploit their rebellions, their adulations, and their illusions. The success of the festival was based ont he tropismic attraction of 'Big Name' singers and groups (the counter-culture's Personality Cult!), idols who command colossal financial rewards from personal appearances and the sales of their discs and films. With its mass mobilization of private cars and buses, its congestion of traffic en route, and its large-scale pollution of the environment, the Woodstock Festival mirrored and even grossly magnified the worst features of the system that many young rebels profess to reject, if not to destroy. The one positive achievement of this mass mobilization, apparently, was the warm sense of instant fellowship produced by the close physical contact of a hundred thousand bodies floating in the haze and daze of pot. Our present mass-minded, over-regimented, depersonalized culture has nothing to fear from this kind of reaction-equally regimented, equally depersonalized, equally under external control. What is this but the Negative Power Complex, attached by invisible electrodes to the same pecuniary pleasure center.

By 1969, dancing was all but forbidden by rock bands who insisted that their audiences sit obediently and consume drugs en masse whilst trapped in enormous arenas, raceways, pastures, and superdomes. The rebellion of narcotics had the appeal of being hermetic, secretive, and illegal, but their real purpose was escape from rock itself, which had become intolerable.

The International Committee to support People’s War in India salutes all the initiatives held in different countries of the world for the International Days of action on 29-30-31 January 2015. We are carefully collecting all these small and wide actions. They are a sign of solidarity of proletarians and peoples with the fighting masses in India, marching to the liberation from imperialism, feudalism and comprador bourgeoisie, along the epic rebellion began in Naxalbari on 1967, which impetuously comes up to the present day.

those who had defended the Republic were court-martialled and executed en masse for “military rebellion”, a punishment that would continue after 1939.

those who had defended the Republic court-martialled and executed en masse for “military rebellion”.

For those black youth who are constantly followed by the police and shamed by teachers, relatives, and strangers, embracing the stigma of criminality is an act of rebellion—an attempt to carve out a positive identity in a society that offers them little more than scorn, contempt, and constant surveillance.

Any revolutionary movement that builds a mass following will have to contend with the kind of state-orchestrated vilification and vigilante violence that plagued Paine’s life. Vitriol and violence will be unleashed, with the tacit approval of the state, on all who resist, even nonviolently. These reactionary movements, while defining themselves as the guardians of patriotism and the Christian faith, will draw on the deep reserves of racial hostility. The hidden agenda of right-wing militias, the Tea Party, the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, the National Rifle Association, and the survivalist cults is to ensure that guns will keep the home and family from being overrun by the crazed black hordes that will escape from their colonies in our urban slums.

The accumulated rage of the Mizrahim against Mapai governments eventually found its expression in “the rebellion at the polls” during the 1977 elections, when Mizrahim shifted their allegiance en masse to the right-wing Likud Party. Later, much of this political energy was co-opted into religious Mizrahi parties, which gradually diverted any potential radicalism into anti-Palestinian sentiment. By 2009, the Mizrahi orthodox Shas Party, which at its onset was politically moderate, had become an extremely right-wing, racist party.

There can be no doubt that continued concentration of wealth cannot be economically sustained. Extreme inequality and massive repression will only bring resistance and rebellion by the world’s masses.

Glasgow did have the occasional statue of a scientist or whatever, but it was largely mass murderers. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the plinth said, hero of the Indian Rebellion of 1858.This was Britain, and if you killed enough foreigners, they let you ride a metal horse into the future.

Smile Before Pills (Sonnet 1402) The only permanence we have is each other, The only paradise we have is each other. Heaven is as real as we are to each other, Most potent medicine we have is each other. One moment of love is time eternal, 100 years of hate are but ghost of wild past. One rebellion of love is destiny in making, 100 rituals of hate are just monkeys' mass. A smile works faster than a pill, both metaphorically and physiologically. Pills take hours to reach your bloodstream, while a smile triggers instant release of neurochemicals, which alleviates pain and facilitates immunity. Sure, pills and prescriptions are a scientific boon, They achieve wonders where organic powers fall short. Yet, there is no prescription for a mannerless medico, There is no pharmaceutical cure for a medical upstart.

One moment of love is time eternal, 100 years of hate are but ghost of wild past. One rebellion of love is destiny in making, 100 rituals of hate are just monkeys' mass.

Bail, it’s the only way. It’s the only hope you have of remaining in a position to do anyone any good. Vote for Palpatine. Vote for the Empire. Make Mon Mothma vote for him, too. Be good little Senators. Mind your manners and keep your heads down. And keep doing… all those things we can’t talk about. All those things I can’t know. Promise me, Bail.

Nowadays myths can be practically momentary: transmitted throughout the world by 24-hour news and the internet, they spread virally, entering the minds of tens and hundreds of millions of people in minutes or hours. Are these true myths, or mass-manufactured fantasies? At times they can be both. In recent years images of resistance to tyranny have been relayed around the world by mass media, many of them captured on mobile phones by the resisters themselves. The myths of revolution that moved the resisters were reinforced, for a time, by the media that make the news. But myths survive for only as long as they are enacted by those who accept them. As popular uprisings go through their normal sequence of rebellion, anarchy and renewed

Nowadays myths can be practically momentary: transmitted throughout the world by 24-hour news and the internet, they spread virally, entering the minds of tens and hundreds of millions of people in minutes or hours. Are these true myths, or mass-manufactured fantasies? At times they can be both. In recent years images of resistance to tyranny have been relayed around the world by mass media, many of them captured on mobile phones by the resisters themselves. The myths of revolution that moved the resisters were reinforced, for a time, by the media that make the news. But myths survive for only as long as they are enacted by those who accept them. As popular uprisings go through their normal sequence of rebellion, anarchy and renewed tyranny, the myth of revolution dissipates to be replaced by new myths of conspiracy and betrayal. Myths

Whenever American farmers leave their plows en masse and race threateningly after the regular politicians they are called wild jackasses, or worse. An agrarian tide is said to be rising, or a fire sweeping the prairies, or a farm rebellion in progress. Mixing of the burning and flowing and rebelling metaphors is hard to avoid...The hoofprints of the wild jackasses are on our democracy, and its configuration is the better for them.

Maybe you go to mass every day. But if you live for your own selfish benefit, and have no concern for the difficulties of your neighbour, as if they did not touch you at all, then all you have done is take part in the sacrament in a merely outward way. The sacrifice of the mass, in a spiritual sense, means that we become one body with the Body of Christ, living members of His Church. If your love for things is guided by Christ, if you think all your possessions to be things you hold in trust for the good of all, if you take upon yourself the difficulties and sufferings of your neighbour as if they were your own, then you may take part in mass very fruitfully, because now you take part in a spiritual way… But to worship Christ with nothing more than outward ceremonies, as if such worship were the height of spirituality, while all the time you are puffed up with self-importance, and condemn other people, and think yourself secure because you live and die in your outward worship: well, the very ordinances of worship that were meant to draw you to Christ will withdraw you from Him. Your religion is a rebellion against the spirit of the Gospel, a falling back into the superstitions and rituals of Judaism ... The apostle Paul, the foremost defender of spiritual religion, never ceased trying to get the Jews to give up their confidence in outward works and rituals, and to lead them to spiritual realities. Yet I feel that the great majority of Christians have fallen back again into that sickness.

History seemed to repeat itself. Just as the white elite had successfully driven a wedge between poor whites and blacks following Bacon's Rebellion by creating the institution of black slavery, another racial caste system was emerging nearly two centuries later, in part due to efforts by white elites to decimate a multiracial alliance of poor people. By the turn of the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks and discriminated against them in virtually every sphere of life, lending sanction to a racial ostracism that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries. Politicians competed with each other by proposing and passing ever more stringent, oppressive, and downright ridiculous legislation (such as laws specifically prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together). The public symbols and constant reminders of black subjugation were supported by whites across the political spectrum, though the plight of poor whites remained largely unchanged. For them, the racial bribe was primarily psychological.

Prior to the rebellion the great mass of the people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. In fact an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers. So much was the country divided into small communities that localized idioms had grown up, so that you could almost tell what section a person was from by hearing him speak.

there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’ If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet ——! He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women’s voices — had burst from a side-street a little way ahead.

The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly, echoing Marx, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”23

These vigilante groups have been tolerated, and often encouraged and utilized, by the ruling elite. And roaming the landscape along with these vigilante groups have been lone gunmen and mass killers who murder for money or power or to appease their own personal demons.

Vigilante groups in America do not trade violence for violence. They are mostly white men who often prey on people of color and radicals. They are capitalism’s ideological vanguard, its shock troops used to break populist movements and tyrannize the oppressed. And they will be unleashed against any mass movement that seriously threatens the structures of capitalist power and calls for rebellion.

Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country’s livestock, and unprecedented political destabilization, Stalin did not flinch. Feints in the form of tactical retreats notwithstanding, he would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding—full speed ahead to socialism

For all his saintly qualities, however, Kropotkin by no means offered blanket opposition to the use of violence. He upheld the assassination of tyrants if the perpetrators were impelled by noble motives, though his acceptance of bloodshed in such instances was inspired by compassion for the oppressed rather than by any personal hatred of the ruling despots. Kropotkin believed that acts of terror were among the very few means of resistance available to the enchained masses; they were useful as "propaganda by the deed," calculated to supplement oral and written propaganda in awakening the rebellious instincts of the people. Nor did Kropotkin shrink from revolution itself, for he hardly expected the propertied classes to give up their privileges and possessions without a fight. Like Bakunin, he anticipated an upheaval that would demolish capitalism and the state for all time. Nevertheless, he earnestly hoped that the rebellion would be a tame one, with "the smallest number of victims, and a minimum of embitterment." Kropotkin's revolution was to be speedy and humane—quite unlike Bakunin's demonic visions of fire and brimstone.

Stanley Laurel throws a pie which hits Oliver Hardy in the face. In the physicist's model or reality-tunnel (the two overlap in this case) the best description of what has happened is Newton's F equals ma (Force equals mass times acceleration). In the anthropological reality-tunnel, what has happened is a continuation of the Feast of Fools or Saturnalia or the tradition of the royal fool who is immune from the tabu against rebellion in comic form. To some Freudians, the best reality-tunnel is that the Son's rage against the Father is being expressed symbolically. To some Marxists, it is the worker's rage against the boss. Etc.

Politicians, a moribund labor movement, and the mass media—either cowed or in the service of corporate power—assure the population that the old prosperity is still attainable, but via a different route. Prosperity will no longer come from expanding the manufacturing base, which characterized the very real prosperity of working men and women immediately after World War II. The neoliberal version of the promise of rising living standards is based on the fallacy of economic deregulation and financialization. Let us be rich, the elites say, and you will share in the spoils.

On closer inspection, as the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol and the Ph.D. student Vanessa Williamson observed in their 2012 book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, the Tea Party movement was a “mass rebellion…funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

Bulgakov and Roth understood that there is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. Political debate and ideological constructs for these elites are just so much absurdist theater, a cynical species of public spectacle and mass entertainment. These systems, like our own, are organized kleptocracies.

The Tea Party Movement was a mass rebellion funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

the Tea Party movement was a “mass rebellion…funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.” Behind

As a New York Times poll later showed, over three-quarters of its supporters identified as Republican. The bulk of the remainder felt the Republican Party was not Republican enough. Finally, although many of its supporters were likely political neophytes, from the start the ostensibly anti-elitist rebellion was funded, stirred, and organized by experienced political elites. On closer inspection, as the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol and the Ph.D. student Vanessa Williamson observed in their 2012 book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, the Tea Party movement was a “mass rebellion…funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

Knowledge is power. The moment the masses acquire this power, control fades. And when control fades, chaos erupts.

American urge to reinvent ourselves in the wilderness spiked into its largest, most influential and most radical manifestation ever. That decade, as many as a million young Americans uprooted themselves, almost en masse, abandoning their urban and suburban backgrounds in favor of a life in the countryside. They were almost all white, well-educated, and from middle-class or wealthy backgrounds. This was not a coincidence. For many, the choice to live a life of radical austerity and anachronism was certainly a rebellion against the comfort and prosperity of their Eisenhower-era childhoods, but that same background of comfort also offered a security and safety net that made such radical choices possible. For some, trust funds and allowances actually financed their rural experiments; for most others, family support was more implied than actual—if things really went wrong on the farm, they knew, their parents could bail them out or take them in. But even those who had cut ties with their families altogether were still the recipients of a particular, inherited confidence.

The peasant rebellion against collectivization was the most serious episode in popular resistance experienced by the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. In 1930, more than two million peasants took part in 13,754 mass disturbances. In 1929 and 1930, the OGPU recorded 22,887 "terrorists acts" aimed at local officials and peasant activists, more than 1,100 murders.

For those black youth who are constantly followed by the police and shamed by teachers, relatives, and strangers, embracing the stigma of criminality is an act of rebellion—an attempt to carve out a positive identity in a society that offers them little more than scorn, contempt, and constant surveillance. Ronny,

The armistice that ended the First World War had given birth to an uneasy peace. The disillusioned youth who survived the first global conflict had their brief period of rebellion before the Great Depression burdened the population with an economic crisis so devastating that it crippled the world’s markets, engendering mass unemployment that in turn led to social discontent and distrust in government.

But, in special, we detest and refuse the usurped authority of that Roman Antichrist upon the Scriptures of God, upon the Kirk, the civil magistrate, and consciences of men; all his tyrannous laws made upon indifferent things against our Christian liberty; his erroneous doctrine against the sufficiency of the written Word, the perfection of the law, the office of Christ, and His blessed evangel; his corrupted doctrine concerning original sin, our natural inability and rebellion to God's law, our justification by faith only, our imperfect sanctification and obedience to the law; the nature, number, and use of the holy sacraments; his five bastard sacraments, with all his rites, ceremonies, and false doctrine, added to the ministration of the true sacraments without the word of God; his cruel judgment against infants departing without the sacrament; his absolute necessity of baptism; his blasphemous opinion of transubstantiation, or real presence of Christ's body in the elements, and receiving of the same by the wicked, or bodies of men; his dispensations with solemn oaths, perjuries, and degrees of marriage forbidden in the Word; his cruelty against the innocent divorced; his devilish mass; his blasphemous priesthood; his profane sacrifice for sins of the dead and the quick; his canonization of men; calling upon angels or saints departed, worshipping of imagery, relics, and crosses; dedicating of kirks, altars, days; vows to creatures; his purgatory, prayers for the dead; praying or speaking in a strange language, with his processions, and blasphemous litany, and multitude of advocates or mediators; his manifold orders, auricular confession; his desperate and uncertain repentance; his general and doubtsome faith; his satisfactions of men for their sins; his justification by works, opus operatum, works of supererogation, merits, pardons, peregrinations, and stations; his holy water, baptizing of bells, conjuring of spirits, crossing, sayning, anointing, conjuring, hallowing of God's good creatures, with the superstitious opinion joined therewith; his worldly monarchy, and wicked hierarchy; his three solemn vows, with all his shavellings of sundry sorts; his erroneous and bloody decrees made at Trent, with all the subscribers or approvers of that cruel and bloody band, conjured against the Kirk of God. And finally, we detest all his vain allegories, rites, signs, and traditions brought in the Kirk, without or against the word of God, and doctrine of this true reformed Kirk; to the which we join ourselves willingly, in doctrine, faith, religion, discipline, and use of the holy sacraments, as lively members of the same in Christ our head: promising and swearing, by the great name of the LORD our GOD, that we shall continue in the obedience of the doctrine and discipline of this Kirk, and shall defend the same, according to our vocation and power, all the days of our lives; under the pains contained in the law, and danger both of body and soul in the day of God's fearful judgment.

the rebels of 1905, at the frontier on which they stand united, teach us, to the sound of exploding bombs, that rebellion cannot lead, without ceasing to be rebellion, to consolation and to the comforts of dogma. Their only evident victory is to triumph at least over solitude and negation. In the midst of a world which they deny and which rejects them, they try, man after man, like all the great-hearted ones, to reconstruct a brotherhood of man. The love they bear for one another, which brings them happiness even in the desert of a prison, which extends to the great mass of their enslaved and silent fellow men, gives the measure of their distress and of their hopes. To serve this love, they must first kill; to inaugurate the reign of innocence, they must accept a certain culpability. This contradiction will be resolved for them only at the very last moment. Solitude and chivalry, renunciation and hope will only be surmounted by the willing acceptance of death.

It does, however, form part of a wider and more profound movement of mass rebellion against the established order.

How then is 68 to be defined? It had several components: generational rebellion of the young against the old, political rebellion against militarism, capitalism and the political power of the United States and cultural rebellion that revolved around rock music and lifestyle. These rebellions sometimes interacted, but they did not always do so. 68 often subverted or circumvented existing structures. It emphasized spontaneity rather than formality. The mass meeting and the sit-in replaced formal meetings. Unofficial strikes, factory occupations and attempts to establish worker cooperatives challenged the power of trade unions as well as that of employers. Sometimes, it seemed that 68 subverted itself and that the movements of the early 1970s –women’s liberation, gay liberation and some of the organizations devoted to armed struggle –were rebellions against, as well as continuations of, aspects of 68.

In their authoritative 1995 work, Voice and Equality, political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady demonstrated that political activity varied by class. Their study found that 86 percent of high-income people reported having voted, but only 52 percent of low-income people said they voted. And 73 percent of high-income people were involved with a political organization, compared to 29 percent of low-income people. A 2012 sequel by the same authors showed a widening of these patterns, as institutions of working-class participation such as trade unions continued to decline, while the influence of the wealthy concentrated. The affluent go to meetings, are active members of groups concerned with public issues, and develop “civic skills” far more than the poor do—and that disparity has been widening. The iconic Norman Rockwell painting of an ordinary working fellow standing up to speak his mind at a town meeting, meant to depict one of FDR’s Four Freedoms, belongs to another era. And yet, in the Trump rebellion, regular working people who had little regard for civic norms abruptly recovered their voices in a fashion characteristic of mass society—disaffected people sharing not always rational rage with an irrational leader. They even formed new, Tocqueville-style associations, the Tea Parties. Voice and Equality concluded that lower-income people participate at lower rates for three reasons: “they can’t” (because they lack the time or money); “they don’t want to” (because they don’t believe that politics will make a positive difference in their lives); and “nobody asked them” (the political system has few avenues of recruitment for lower-income people). In a survey of why so many people avoided politics, one key reason was that politics felt irrelevant. This view, of course, was also correlated by social class. Nobody in large corporations believes that politics is irrelevant. Trust in government—and in all major institutions—has been falling for half a century. When the American National Election Study first asked the question in 1958, 73 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” That sense of trust peaked in 1964, at 78 percent, and has been steadily dropping ever since. By 2015, it was down to just 19 percent. The

[T]he course of development most typical of our society is ... the transformation of a lively and promising human infant, through a period of indoctrination, disillusion and rebellion, into an emotionally constricted, competitively hostile adult saturated in the values of commodity consumption, desperately conforming, anxiously pursuing an ever-receding 'happiness', bereft of any ability to criticize the society in which he or she is located, pathetically eager to enjoy those of its 'fruits' (consumer durables) which are within reach. This is the great, inertially stable backbone of our society, the guardian of its values and the target of its mass media, working tirelessly in the interests of others and blindly against its own, forced by the crushing vice of economic power into reproducing itself reliably and endlessly in its children.

Anarchism rejects authority in any form: to the principle of representation, it opposes the direct and independent action of individuals and masses: to !egalitarian and parliamentarian action, it opposes rebellion, insurrection, the general strike, the social revolution.

Without recognizing it, humankind created a weapon of mass destruction—one that only became apparent after machines took over every aspect of their lives. —BARBAROSSA, Anatomy of a Rebellion