Penelope Rosemont

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.

-- Oscar Wilde

...and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen. The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

-- From Adbusters (September/October 2011 issue)

We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commoded, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios and police ‘protection.’ Hold on to these spaces, nurture them and let the boundaries of your occupations grow.

-- Egyptian (Tahrir Square) Comrades

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Madness & the Surrealist Imagination

The common denominator of the sorcerer, the poet and the madman cannot be anything but magic...the flesh and blood of poetry.

--Benjamin Peret

Surrealists have celebrated madness as a means of exploring the possibilities of the human mind. Madness provides that window into how people put together reality; how thoughts are often assembled in an unusual and creative way.

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Words embody, embrace, define an era. Make Love, Not War, a slogan 1960s rebels created fifty years ago in March 1965 is still around today, often echoed, modified, mocked, transformed. (A wonderful Berkeley Bakery, for instance, boasts, “Make Bread, Not War,” on its banner.)

The original saying was created at Chicago’s Solidarity Bookshop, a “do-it-yourself-revolution project” of Roosevelt University anarchists and IWW members who decided to make an anti-war button. What came to mind was the old Fellowship of Reconciliation slogan “Make Peace, Not War,” but this didn’t reflect our thinking; it was too tame.

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a review of Subversions: Anarchist Short Stories Ed. Anarchist Writers Bloc, Les Pages Noires 2011, Montreal 115 pages, Softcover, $14.95 U.S.

This collection is the first ever in English or French of new anarchist fiction. These sixteen stories, offer something for everyone: If you like action, there is plenty of action, as well as surprise endings and thought provoking parables. This is a great idea for a collection of stories and it is wonderful that it exists as an accomplished fact. Pulled together with lots of hard work and inspiration--expressing self-organization, self actualization and cooperation at its best--the publication of this book is a do-it-yourself revolutionary action that means to make a difference in this world.

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“Work, now? Never, never. I’m on strike.”

—Rimbaud

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the Paris Commune, an experiment in self-governance that is still inspiring today. It was born in response to the suffering caused by the Franco-Prussian War and the betrayals of the French central government.

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a review of

None of This Is Real by Miranda Mellis, Sidebrow Books, San Francisco, 2012, 115 pp., $18, sidebrow.net.

Leonora Carrington, the great surrealist creator of paintings and stories, is quoted as saying, “The duty of the right eye is to plunge into the telescope, whereas the left eye interrogates the microscope.”

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Introduction

As we explore routes out of today’s stifling, mechanized, crisis-bound world the FE staff opens the magazine’s pages to many forms of subversive research and many flavors of anarchic revolt.

The Chicago Surrealist group Penelope Rosemont discusses below was inspired by the Surrealist movement that began in Europe in the 1920s. Surrealism is a conscious project for utilizing the discoveries of Freudian psychology to subvert the ruling order by images and words, elaborating forms through which people can express and gratify their repressed desires and challenge societal oppression.

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