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by Clifton Ross (Author)
A riveting personal memoir that shares hard-earned political insights. Ross's journey begins on Air Force bases and in small, conservative towns in the American South. We follow his political and spiritual development from an Anabaptist peace community in the 1970s, through various forms of radical and countercultural politics, to the present-day failures of "revolutions" throughout Latin America, with a particular focus on the Bolivarian process in Venezuela. The book charts a path through good intentions, projects gone awry, and the shadow side of utopian dreams--ultimately locating hope in the social movements of ordinary people who resist the imposition of states and other actors that claim to represent them.
Clifton Ross is a translator, filmmaker, and writer. He is co-editor, with Marcy Rein, of Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements. Ross's book of poetry, Translations from Silence, received PEN Oakland's 2010 Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Praise for Home from the Dark Side of Utopia: "An incisive and urgently needed political critique that can only be ignored at great cost... Ross shows how quickly fantasy takes the place of empirical reality when the leftist imagination takes flight in the misty realm of solidarity, and how easily the actions of charismatic leaders, state officials, and political vanguards are identified with the will of the people." --John Clark, author of The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism "[Ross's] version of the Emerald City is, first, a world in which decision making is decentralized and communal, but also, and just as important, a world in which the desired social transformation comes about in a spirit of experimentation, with an understanding in advance that what happens will be a patchwork of failures as well as successes. --Staughton Lynd, from the ForewordAuthor Biography
Clif Ross grew up on military bases in the U.S. and Europe. He's worked as a laborer, translator, editor, writer, printer, filmmaker and teacher.
Ross edited and co-translated A Dream Made of Stars: A Bilingual Anthology of Nicaraguan Poetry (1986, Berkeley, Ca: Co-Press); Quetzalcóatl by Ernesto Cardenal (1990, Berkeley, Ca: New Earth Publications); and the first collection of Zapatista materials to appear in English, Voice of Fire: Communiqués and Interviews of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (1994, Berkeley: New Earth Publications).
In 2005 Clif represented the U.S. in Venezuela's World Poetry Festival and from 2005-2006 he reported from Mérida, Venezuela and began work on his movie, Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out (2008, Oakland, Ca: PM Press). His book of poetry, Translations from Silence (2009, San Francisco: Freedom Voices), won Oakland PEN's Josephine Miles Award in 2010 and was released in Spanish in 2011 (2006, Caracas, VE: Editorial Perro y Rana) as Traducciones del Silencio. His most recent book was Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements, co-edited with his wife, Marcy Rein (2014, Oakland, CA: PM Press).
