Rhetorically Red & Black

Women in Action

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:32:00 -0400

Another tumblr blog of mine, because I cannot help but reblog images of strong amazing women without rhetorical commentary.

"‘Anarchy’ and ‘anarchist’ were first used freely in the political sense..."

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:01:04 -0500

“‘Anarchy’ and ‘anarchist’ were first used freely in the political sense during the French Revolution. Then they were terms of negative criticism, and sometimes of abuse, employed by various parties to damn their opponents, and usually those of the Left.”

- Woodcock, George. 2004. Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview. p. 12.

Anarchist Music via Crimethinc

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:36:00 -0500

Anarchist Music via Crimethinc:

“Raised within and surrounded by a society based on alienation, we find that keeping the small amount of hard-won social terrain that we have taken as anarchists, is another battle in itself. Whenever the momentum of conflict is broken, depression and stagnation are often close behind. This can contribute to a sense of transience within our informal networks, as allies burn-out, drop-out, or move away. If this impulse is engaged in another way, however, our access to mobility can become a strength. In the present context, we have access to both the mobility of bodies and of information, each of which can be used to build solidarity and broaden our networks to include those far away. By spending our time in different situations, with the specific intent of bringing back new skills, projects, and energy to our battlefields at home, the relationships and territories we have already fought to create can be defended and sustained. By intensifying our relationships instead of withdrawing from them, we are able to spread ideas, tactics, and support across daunting barriers, and maintain the continuity of war.”

"Syndicalism envisages a radically democratic unionism as prefiguring the new world, and aims to..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:51:00 -0500

“Syndicalism envisages a radically democratic unionism as prefiguring the new world, and aims to organize across borders and in promotion of a revolutionary popular counterculture. It rejects bureaucratic styles of unionism as well as the notion the unions should only concern themselves with economic issues or electing prolabour political parties”

- Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt in Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism

That’s right folks—according to this article in the New Yorker,...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:50:00 -0500

That’s right folks—according to this article in the New Yorker, Occupy was organized by transgendered anarchists. Now, I have nothing against transgendered individuals, and I applauded the author’s desire to draw attention to individuals who played a role in the early stages of Occupy. However, this is once again an instance where the author attempts to create what Kenneth Burke calls a division between the Occupy participants and the readers. By drawing attention to the differences rather than the similarities, an “us versus them” mentality is privileged. That’s not to say savvy or open-minded readers become brainwashed—only that the preference for one interpretation of events can influence how other related topics are perceived.

"In this city there is an energy that permeates through all of us so much so that when we gather in..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:29:20 -0500

“In this city there is an energy that permeates through all of us so much so that when we gather in our communities a soft warm glow emerges which reaches everyone in the room. We call that love, and it is the only shield we have to protect ourselves from the dreadfulness of this world.”

This gem of an article I found on none other than NPR....

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:28:20 -0500

This gem of an article I found on none other than NPR. Originally published in the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, the editors of the beloved liberal radio felt this article presented a fair perspective of Occupy.

There are countless things about the article I can comment on including the fact the author confuses anarcho-syndicalism (the concept of the culture of an idea to promote change) with revolutionary anarchism (disruption of reality to create change) as demonstrated by the second paragraph. However, there are two key things I want to focus on here.

#1. In the first paragraph, the author states, “the concerns of labor intersect only tangentially with those of Occupy Wall Street’s theorists and prime movers.” For the sake of argument let’s ignore two hundred years of labor history and the role of radical groups in the labor movements. Let’s also ignore the fact that Socialists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, and Communists put labor at their central focus. When a group of people are focused on critiquing political decisions that are made to benefit the leaders of the corporation rather than the individuals working—labor is involved. In essence, what the author is trying to do is redefine the individuals involved in Occupy. By pointing out the differences between the average working person versus an occupier, the similarities between the two are masked.

#2. Because this article appears on the NPR website, by default it is privileged as an “unbiased” article. One might even argue that with a conservative origin on a liberal news site it is showing a “truer” perspective of occupy. In essence, through the medium of the website, the information in article is being “framed” as “something that supports the values of NPR”.

Great.