We were involved with numerous different political factions fighting each other over the correct line to take vis-á-vis Africa, liberation, and the role activists in the United States should play. There were profound political issues that underlay our choices about what we sang, and what we did and why we did it. The failure of the RCP to grasp the dialectics of Karl Marx himself and his mentor Hegel, let alone to grasp that there are different cultures, languages, media, and perspectives, meant a crippling and flattening out of the expressive potential of the rebellious spirit. We played on picket lines in Milwaukee and at rallies in El Paso. The brief resurgence of energy that was punk rock simply could not and did not prevail against the larger, global forces at work. I witnessed all the same damn hierarchical and privileged structures of knowing, being, and assigning social tasks that have been the identifiers of a class society for the past 10,000 years. This is a major reason we have all so often found ourselves surrendering the very terrain on which we are the strongest, that of the imagination, the experiential and the spiritual. I’ve seen this disjunction between theory and practice in various people on the left over the years, but I saw more of the blatant hypocrisy I despised in society at large manifested by its most vociferous and committed opponents, people who called themselves revolutionary communists. It is the two states in conflict that produce the sparks of inspiration and creation. Prairie Fire played at several of these events, including one just across the street from the White House. Jones told me that they were just musicians, saying what they wanted to say but with no illusions about leading any kind of revolution. This is illogical and incompatible with a worldview claiming to be scientific. The Weather Underground, who wrote Prairie Fire, escalated their level of violence after those murders. We dug up some old Wobblie numbers and a couple others from the book Hard Hitting Songs For Hard Hit People and started performing semi-regularly at various rallies, meetings, and parties. No one can fault an individual for being a product of his or her times, but the individual can strive to act in accordance with the liberatory principles he or she espouses in order to exemplify in deed what is expressed in word. What I can say now is that what I experienced between International Women’s Day 1971 when Prairie Fire first performed, and the last half of 1980 when the whole thing unraveled, was extraordinary by any measure. December 27–30 – Weathermen held a "War Council" in Flint, Michigan , where plans were finalized to change into an underground organization that would commit strategic acts of sabotage against the government. An aliveness whose next step is activism and the fight for more aliveness, for all. By the late ’70s Prairie Fire had become a rock band. We toured the country again, this time to colleges all over the U.S. that had large numbers of Iranian students. In the late 1970s the Clash were riding high – advertised as “the only band that matters” – and the RCP was touting them as the spokesmen of radical youth, anointing them the vanguard of proletarian culture. There is – and few would dispute it – a profound contradiction between creative expression and control. Kind of silly in retrospect, but it gives some idea of what mattered to reds in those days. From title page: The publisher's copyright is not intended to discourage the use of material from this book for political debate and study. For all the satisfaction of being an artistic contributor to liberation struggles, I came to have profound differences with the Revolutionary Communist Party and other parties, prompting an eventual break from them. We played at the tops of mineshafts in West Virginia and at union meetings in New York. This means that no ideas of “career” or having to get a gig were ever involved. At first we only had a few songs of a political character. To see what your friends thought of this book, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism. I was a musician when I met Sandy but it is important to note that by the time we began what was to become Prairie Fire we were full-time revolutionaries; music was a weapon and we were among those with skills to wield it. African Liberation Day demonstrations were just picking up steam in the late 1970s, along with the struggle against South African apartheid. The first of our records had been called Out of Gas about the energy crisis in the early ’70s. Shortly after returning I was involved in a very militant and sometimes violent strike in the warehouses where I worked. So where are love and laughter in the future? Refresh and try again. That anxiety masked the reality that the great wave of revolutionary struggle that had risen worldwide around 1968 – Tet, Paris, Prague, Chicago, etc. Start by marking “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism” as Want to Read: Error rating book. We sang some original songs I’d written and old pop tunes at a couple of parties. The practice of a group which organizes itself around the principle of the liberation of humanity, to be achieved via mass revolution, demonstrates the very definition of liberation and revolution in how the group actively pursues those goals. Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba The place erupted like nothing I’d ever seen. We looked to London and were inspired by the Clash, but some who caught us also noted a lot of Who-style leaps and power chords, and some Springsteen-like storytelling; Sandy’s vocals sometimes soared alone or in duets like Grace Slick’s in the Jefferson Airplane. If you were a Party member you could not disagree because disagreement meant challenging the superior grasp of truth by the leadership and implied disloyalty, a threat to unity and, potentially, enemy action. In the heady days of the early 1970s, when the radical movement was large and growing, we played for enormous crowds at antiwar demonstrations and for small gatherings, often called to meet and greet visiting luminaries of various leftist persuasions. We have attempted to produce a readable pocket size book at a reasonable cost. This paragraph in this book is quite intriguing: This is Black History Month 2014, and (among other subjects) I have been reading about the Black Panthers, especially Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, whom the FBI and Chicago Police murdered on December 4, 1969. I also disagreed with the RCP on the issue of ends and means. I am still doing it and hope to continue the rest of my life. The Weather Underground, who wrote, “Any conception of socialism defined in national terms, within so extreme and predatory an oppressor nation as the US, is a view that leads in practice to a fight for particular privileged interest and is a very dangerous ideology. A basic disconnect happens between specificity and generality among leftists of all stripes. We are printing as many as fast as limited resources allow. I loved that band but they were not what the RCP thought they were at all, and my disillusionment with the whole political scene I was involved with probably began with a long, intense discussion with Clash guitarist Mick Jones. Punk was starting to happen and thrive in San Francisco. For numerous reasons Red Rock ended after six months but even after that my partner Sandy and I continued singing together. I remember counting once, just before embarking on tour, that we had been playing at least two times a week, somewhere at some event, for the previous two years. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. Our tour in 1975 took us to 58 cities in 29 states. Published: Bad Subjects, #56, Summer 2001. African Liberation Day demonstrations were just picking up steam in the late 1970s, along with the struggle against South African apartheid. It is intended to prevent false and distorted reproduction and profiteering. For the RCP, humanity is devided into three groups: the enemy, the masses, and party members. The backdrop, of course, was “the ’60s,” the struggles against the Vietnam War, for Black Liberation and the reemergence of Marxist politics amongst a new generation. The band Prairie Fire reflected this situation and consequently was no longer as good musically, lyrically, or in social effect as we had been. Nevertheless, I did not stop doing what I was doing then. We have attempted to produce a readable pocket size book at a reasonable cost. After four months on the road we were ready to get back to San Francisco and the organizing each of us was doing in our respective workplaces. Copyright: Mat Callahan, 2001. Religion makes its truth claims based on what cannot be known, requiring faith as the basis for communication and knowledge of any kind. During the next couple of years we were even more active as organizers than as musicians, but we still continued to perform regularly and all over the country. (’Death to the Shah!’). One of my first organized political discussions centered around the section on “people’s war.” Involvement with the RCP led to the high points in the Prairie Fire story: the Bicentennial, the African struggles, and finally the Iranian revolution. What had been possible earlier was not possible any longer, and all the yelling and screaming of punks, anarchists, or Maoists was not going to change that. The Party ’ s book Testimony was published in 2000, and it took us to 58 in! 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