Darnton “suggests that between the end of the war of the Austrian succession in 1748 and the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the French population underwent a series of convulsions, some as molten as others were icy, which resulted in a subtle but powerful molecular shift.”
Category: Blog
“1848: Europe’s Year of Revolt and Revolution”
From Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring (2023)
Mariana Budjeryn: Calling the war in Ukraine a ‘tragedy’ shelters its perpetrators from blame and responsibility
“Tragedy is a word used ubiquitously by Ukraine empathizers discussing the horrors of the war in Ukraine. But, it turns out, the word tragedy is also popular with autocrats who are responsible for bringing those events about – but have no intention of admitting their responsibility.”
Marcello Tarì’s “There Is No Unhappy Revolution” reviewed by Chrys Papaioannou
“Written from the standpoint of an intellectual who remains committed to the political project of insurrectionary communism, Tarì’s monograph-cum-manifesto will no doubt rouse readers who take textual pleasure in the insurgent lyricism of militant collectives such as The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun and Colectivo Situaciones.”
“Emory Douglas: The Art of the Black Panthers”
“From 1967 to the Party’s dissolution in the early 1980s, Douglas designed the art that came to define the Black Panthers and their iconography.”
Rachel Collett reviews “Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women” by Kristen Ghodsee
“In exploring the lives of the revolutionary socialist feminists, Red Valkyries demonstrates the value and importance of feminism in the 21st century.”
Christopher Clark reviews Jonathan Beecher’s “Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848″”
“It follows nine contemporary intellectuals – d’Agoult, the novelists George Sand, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, the statesman Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialists Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Alexander Herzen – into the revolution, links arms with them as they pass through its euphoria, confusion and violence, and…
Maria Popova: “The Spirit of Revolt: The Radical Russian Dissident Prince Peter Kropotkin on How to Reboot a Complacent Society”
“There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the…
“The German Revolution of 1918: Revolutionary November” (video)
Conor Bean reviews “Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution” (2021) by Maurizio Lazzarato
“He remains adamant that any revolutionary organizing on the horizon must accept the effective displacement of the working class from the position of central revolutionary subject, set aside Leninist and Maoist organizing models, and embrace the potentials for historically oppressed subjectivities’ ‘becoming-revolutionary’ in the course of anti-capitalist activity (232)”