Jan 08 2009
working within the system 2
Over 20 years later, Gitlin would still celebrate this fact, failing to see the effects and the irony of this intrusion of a major corporation on the protest/revolutionary movement by saying, “To make it all more marvelous, Dylan did all this not on the marginal, faintly do-it-yourself Vanguard or Folkways label, redolent of Pete Seeger and the fight against the blacklist, but on big-league commercial Columbia Records;” after all those protests, all the violence, all the calls for the downfall of capitalism, all the calls for revolution, Gitlin still fails to see the irony of “working within the System” considering the entire movement he was a part of was a battle against “the System.” Like London, Gitlin and many others failed to see the inherent contradictions. Many, like Anti-Flag, still tend to believe that this insurgency from within is an effective form of protest, message spreading, and revolution. To take a quote of Michael Moore’s from the movie The Corporation:
