Demowp

Tag: Liberal arts education

  • When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free

    Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands), The Starry Night, 1889. In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his […]

  • The Violence of Development

    The Violence of Development

    A revised version (September 2024) of the open-access e-book Food Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order (2022) by Colin Todhunter is now available. A brand-new concluding chapter, “The Violence of Development”, rounds off a book that presents a scathing critique of the global industrial agriculture system and its proponents. The book takes aim […]

  • Contemplation: Which Values, What Actions?

    By mediating between our minds and social reality, the all-encompassing communications media processes such raw social facts into more digestible morsels of factoids, benighted biases, ignorant assumptions, distorted opinions, and alluring pseudo-pleasures. But imagine the following scenario: all interactive media break down.  Silence–and a blank, darkened screen.  No more conditioning and intermittent reinforcement and puppeteering–which […]

  • “Intellectual Hick”: Sorting Out Our Complex Identities

    I am from rural America, sort of. I’m an intellectual, sort of. I’m certainly on the political left, but some comrades believe I’m turned conservative. Like many people, I don’t fit easily into conventional labels used in today’s polarized political debates. To understand me—and anyone else—takes some sorting out. Here’s how I sort myself out. […]

  • The Collective Creativity of Workers

    The Collective Creativity of Workers

    Orientation One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most […]

  • The Oppressor Within

    The Oppressor Within

    The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. — Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” 1970 It has […]

  • Recapturing White Rhetoric for Socialist Agitating

    Recapturing White Rhetoric for Socialist Agitating

    Orientation Leninist and anarchist shortcomings in relation to rhetoric A little over three years ago I wrote an article about how bad Mordor Leninists and anarchists are about knowing about, let alone using rhetorical rhetoric. The article is titled Socialist Rhetorical and Dialectical Communication: Overcoming Brainwashing, Propaganda and Entertainment These areas of bumbling included: Initiation […]

  • The Problems with Purism and Reformism (not reforms)

    Over 20 years ago I wrote one of these columns examining the issue of “purism” versus “pragmatism” when it comes to organizing for systemic and desperately needed change in this world. I wrote about two essential ingredients that are sometimes in conflict. One essential is conscious political organization motivated by principles and a genuine desire […]

  • Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans

    Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans

    Orientation Mythology and folklore can be used for political and religious purposes whether they be to support socialism or fascism. What was going on at the end of the 19th  century politically and in the 1930s that made mythology so attractive to both German and French fascists? Why did the imagined gods of the Indo-Europeans […]

  • Disintegration and Choice

    With regular maintenance stuff lasts longer, but eventually, in spite of every effort, things break down: the washing machine stops washing, the car won’t start, the mobile phone refuses to connect to the internet. Socio-economic-political systems also collapse; shaped by an ideology of some kind, they are, like all ‘isms’, limited, and divisive. Looking at […]

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