Word: mayday
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These questions cannot be resolved alone, in the abstract. They are political questions, and can be resolved only through participation in the process of change-by going outside of one's self, by acting collectively. Despite confusion and private doubts. Mayday was a collective action, is a social fact, and will "mean" some thing when history decides post facto what everything...
...Mayday action was to speakto different constituencies: first it was to consolidate revolutionary consciousness among youth and other alienated groups. Thus the gathering of tribes, a gathering of those already committed to social change. Second, it was to speak to the mass of Americans who oppose the war and also oppose radical change. To them it was a statement that the movement, although in fact radical, is not a bunch of violent crazies, and that in fact it is the state which has a monopoly on violence. It did not try to tell the mass of Americans that the movement...
...beyond the youth culture but have been radicalized by the vision of the new society have been almost exclusively middle class-those with the leisure time, and money, and psychic security that allows them to be free-free to act, free to care, free to love. The vision of Mayday, however, says very little to those - and most of America is among "those"-who do not have those freedoms...
Marcuse says that the goal of the revolution must be liberation. The movement must be utopian; it must seek to make new men and women, who no longer look at the world the way that men and women have looked at the world before. Why was Mayday the first national revolutionary mass action? Why was it, despite all of these questions, an overwhelming triumph...
Those things, that sense of community and interdependence, are what a new society will be all about. And Mayday is just one point along the way to that new society; between the logic of the old and the new; somewhere between the end and the beginning...