What about music as a form of collective entertainment

Music, the art that has survived capitalism and springs up from every part of the earth and every moment that humans have occupied, continues to express societies, classes, nations, genders, metaphysical beliefs, problems, emotions, happiness and pain.  It should not be left on the hands of experts, industries, interests, or government to dictate, to suppress or promote.  As a tool, as most arts, crafts, and techniques, should be redistributed to all those below as users and not passive consumers.  Everyone can learn music, sing, play an instrument.  To do it well takes practice first and a little bit of talent, which we are not convinced of what it really is.

Music has also played a role in popular movements.  There has never been any significant social change without some music associated with the movement that caused it, while music for the sake of producing more music has not lived as long, as the music of social history.  We found a good introduction to a music genre that survived some real sever oppression to follow basic steps of emancipation and struggle to freedom.  The struggle, the living conditions of the past, the pain and suffering of those who sang their way on the narrow path towards liberation, is embedded in their songs.

We Borrowed this From the Music Room


This Primer is dedicated to promoting Rhythm and Blues, but it's clear to anyone with a passing interest in the music that it really doesn't stick to any clear definition of the genre.

John Lee Hooker

As a Primer, it's an attempt to illustrate the music, the labels and the artists of a particular style but it cannot lay claim to be a theoretical, academic or scholarly treatise. This is primarily because I am ill-equipped to do it well and there are others who are far better qualified to deliver a definitive history of the form.

So what you'll find below is an emotional and historically flawed account of the music that the Primer promotes, designed to provide a background and context for what you'll find in the real world..

ZAD, France: This is not a camp

Translated by resistrA http://resistra.espivblogs.net/2014/01/zad-france-this-is-not-a-camp/

Jan 27 2014

it’s a pirate look-out

Following various announcements for a possible start of construction of the Notre Dame des Landes airport, a series of articles were released in the press that pretty much regurgitated copy-pasted clichés. One of these articles caught our attention notably. In almost all the articles that would preach the possible eviction and the final catastrophe of ZAD we read “200 people, alter-globalists, continue to camp in ZAD.” The figure might seem rough. The term “alter-globalists” is not a term that the people who chose to fight against the airport and the world of “development” would embrace. But we don’t give a damn about that! For now we will hang on to the bad joke that describes what’s happening here as “camping”.

1968 : A chronology of events in France and internationally

1968 : A chronology of events in France and internationally

A short chronology of the events which swept France in May and June 1968. Starting as a student revolt, the events culminated in mass workplace occupations and a general strike of 10 million workers.
Followed by a short international chronology.

May 68 - 40 years on

It was a festival without beginning or end; I saw everyone and no-one, for each individual was lost in the same enormous strolling crowd; I spoke to everyone without remembering either my own words or those spoken by others, because everyone's attention was absorbed at every step by new objects and events, and by unexpected news.
— Bakunin, Confessions
May 1968 has entered into legend - to the point where when new waves of struggle break out in France young people get irritated by the inevitable comparisons to 68 that are aired in the media. The 2006 anti-CPE movement is only the most recent example. Yet May 68 was the most advanced movement of an exceptional year of struggle that remains a high-point of the post-WWII era. Hopes and possibilities were raised high - yet the revolution never came, even though the idea of revolution (though often limited and confused) was a part of the general ferment and atmosphere in a way that seems extraordinary now, looking back from where we are. Our times are in many ways the era of counter-revolution that followed - the outcome of the defeat of the struggles of the 1960s and 70s, when 'the social question' dominated life to varying degrees.