Happy Sunday, everyone — and happy Revolution Day. In honor of the occasion:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it .... [W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
— Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776
The 4th of July is a date that marks the death of a tyranny, and a declaration of the right of revolution against any and every government that violates the unalienable rights that belong to all people, regardless of any assigned political status. Of course, in a typical statist inversion, the date has been taken over, twisted, made into a date marked off for the exact opposite of what inspired it — for nationalist bromides, the celebration of a counterrevolutionary Constitutional
government, and grotesque attempts to link up this historic event in the history of anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare with some kind of uncritical celebration of the U.S. government’s standing army. So it’s worth remembering that today is not, really, a holiday to honor armies or States-men or any form of consolidated government anywhere. To-day is a day for radicals and revolutionaries. For people who realize that if it was worth anything at all, the American Revolution is a struggle that’s far from over. Not something dead and embalmed in the necropolis of Washington, D.C., but a living struggle against any and every attempt to tyrannize people, to compact them into political formations without their leave and against their will. It is a day for standing up and standing by the most marginalized, the most criminalized, the most exploited and oppressed, against the powers that be, against the arbitrary violence of soldiers and States-men, and against every form of political regimentation. A government is always the death of revolutions, and real revolutions — when we win — are always the death of governments. As another American revolutionary said of another Revolution:
The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail….
… There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical. —My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).
All power to the people!
Here in this secessionist republic of one, we honored this international revolutionary holiday with a pleasant afternoon Feeding The Revolution with Food Not Bombs. And — given the overlap in the festival days to-day — we’ll also with some commemorative Shamelessness. How about you? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.