April 25, 1974: Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the opening of an enormous class battle that was profoundly influenced by the anti-colonial liberation struggles in Africa. ----------------- Sam Marcy, writing in 1975:

“A Communist takeover of Portugal,” said the New York Times on February 17, “might encourage a similar trend in Italy and France, create problems in Greece and Turkey, affect the succession in Spain and Yugoslavia and send tremors throughout Western Europe.” The Soviet Union is then warned that “détente will be the first casualty.”

In the face of brutal frankness and open threats, can there be any doubt that the imperialist powers are preparing the ground for another Chile on the Iberian Peninsula? Do not the working class parties have the right – in fact the sacred duty – to prepare the mass of the people in advance for precisely this eventuality in the kind of manner which would put an end not merely to fascist threats, but to the ruling class and the system of exploitation upon which it rests?

The way Lenin and Trotsky prepared for the Constituent Assembly in 1917 offers an exceptionally instructive lesson. While utilizing all the legal and electoral opportunities offered, the Bolsheviks, knowing full well the counter-revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, armed the masses ideologically, politically, and physically for the insurrection. It was thus that they put an end to bourgeois rule and transferred the real power into the hands of the workers and peasants.

Free PDF pamphlet of "Portugal - Revolutionary Developments April 1974-July 1975" by Sam Marcy

How the fuck can you consider yourself leftist if your belief is that a leftist society is the ideal but that you believe that for practicality we need to only fight for an implement centrist policies due to "practicality". Like, you do realize that "communism works on paper but it's not possible in practice" is a standard conservative talking point meant to dissmiss leftism?

This appeal to practicality, calling leftist advocates naive, and telling them to change the system from within, used to be the realm of boomer conservatives who used to be leftists, now it's the line of millennial conservatives who used to be leftists and they don't even have the politeness to call themselves conservatives. It's gotten past the point where that's even only being used agaisnt the really radical stuff, you now have people who don't want any advocacy for trans people because they see it as bad optics.

I don't remember who said it, but I once heard someone quote something to the tune of "the only way we've ever gotten any progress to happen in any span of time, is by demanding everything right now."

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters—then we are for it! And we are not in the least disturbed by the howls of those people who consciously or unconsciously side with the bourgeoisie, or who are so frightened by them, so oppressed by their rule, that they have been flung into consternation at the sight of this unprecedentedly acute class struggle, have burst into tears, forgotten all their premises and demand that we perform the impossible, that we socialists achieve complete victory without fighting against the exploiters and without suppressing their resistance. -V. I. Lenin, 1918

Photographs from the Black Panther Party series by Stephen Shames (1970s)

hey does anyone have that drawing Dana made on a stream where Belos is eating a McRib and Hunter is looking at him concerned. I just rlly need to see it again so yeah thx

"But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harpers Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life. "The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail. "Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught. "Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown. "Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader. If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry, and the arsenal, not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. "When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone - the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union - and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown's, the lost cause of the century." -(May 30, 1881, Frederick Douglass, oration at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College, May 30, 1881)

“Revolutionary unity in arms to destroy imperialism, zionism & reaction!” Palestinian National Liberation Movement &  Organization of Iranian People's Fedaii Guerrillas 1979

PERIOD DRAMA APPRECIATION WEEK: DAY 5, FAVORITE FILM ➻ Little Women (2019)

By Che Gossett

It is rather convenient for queer and/or trans counter hirstory to be erased, depoliticized and co-opted. Yet, Leslie Feinberg’s work resists neoliberal depoliticization and instead forces a reckoning with histories of Black radicalism, Palestine solidarity and the legacies of revolutionary trans women of color like Sylvia Rivera. As Leslie stated: “wherever racism rears its ugly head, our movement must be there.” And Leslie meant it and was always there — present in solidarity against trans misogyny, Islamophobia, white supremacy, the silencing of the AIDS epidemic, Israeli apartheid and US imperialism.

I don't even really go here but I have to imagine this is how November 5th felt for Destiel shippers

I’d give it 10 years before American pulls a French Revolution pt. 2