There’s an inner thing in every man,
Do you know this thing my friend?
It has withstood the blows of a million years,
And will do so to the end.

It was born when time did not exist,
And it grew up out of life,
It cut down evil’s strangling vines,
Like a slashing searing knife.

It lit fires when fires were not,
And burnt the mind of man,
Tempering leandened hearts to steel,
From the time that time began.

It wept by the waters of Babylon,
And when all men were a loss,
It screeched in writhing agony,
And it hung bleeding from the Cross.

It died in Rome by lion and sword,
And in defiant cruel array,
When the deathly word was ‘Spartacus’
Along the Appian Way.

It marched with Wat the Tyler’s poor,
And frightened lord and king,
And it was emblazoned in their deathly stare,
As e’er a living thing.

It smiled in holy innocence,
Before conquistadors of old,
So meek and tame and unaware,
Of the deathly power of gold.

It burst forth through pitiful Paris streets,
And stormed the old Bastille,
And marched upon the serpent’s head,
And crushed it ‘neath its heel.

It died in blood on Buffalo Plains,
And starved by moons of rain,
Its heart was buried at Wounded Knee,
But it will come to rise again.

It screamed aloud by Kerry lakes,
As it was knelt upon the ground,
And it died in great defiance,
As they coldly shot it down.

It is found in every light of hope,
It knows no bounds nor space
It has risen in red and black and white,
It is there in every race.

It lies in the hearts of heroes dead,
It screams in tyrants’ eyes,
It has reached the peak of mountains high,
It comes searing ‘cross the skies.
It lights the dark of this prison cell,
It thunders forth its might,
It is ‘the undauntable thought’, my friend,
The thought that says ‘I’m right!’

The Big Picture, A Short, Simplified Version

September 13, 2009

By Paul Anderson

“There must be some kind of way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
Theres too much confusion
I can’t get no relief”
Bob Dylan “All Along the Watch Tower”

If anything expresses the zeitgeist or world spirit, it is our apparent lack of direction.
The collapse of the Soviet Union which signaled the triumph of US imperialism and what Fukuyama called ” The End of History”, accelerated the relentless forward march of neoliberalism and privatizations which was a large victory against erstwhile socialist aspirations born from rebellion against poverty throughout the world. Beforehand, the road to freedom was relatively clear. Workers of the world united, smashed the state machine, and brought about a worker controlled planned economy with the proviso that it was democratic and scorned all Stalinist or counter revolutionary practices. This was the paradigm that informed left debate since Marx.

Somehow, as Hegel explained as a theory of development of knowledge: that human knowledge does not evolve in a straight line but more like a spiral sometimes moving backward towards barbarism.
The leftist paradigm has largely revealed itself to be inadequate. Read the rest of this entry »