“We rarely know how to achieve any continuity from one generation to the next within the alienation and scarcity of capitalism, so we commit the same mistakes again and again. And under the colonial spirituality of rationalism we have forgotten that the real world cannot exist without imaginary worlds. We let capitalism do all our…
Category: Concepts
Sahar Delijani on the Legacies of the Arab Spring
“The revolution in Tunisia was born on the ashes of Mohammad Bouazizi’s body. The revolution in Egypt on the broken face of the 28-year-old Khaleh Said beaten to death by security forces for posting a photo on social media. The revolts in Syria erupted when little boys were arrested and tortured by the police for…
Jean Vioulac: “Revolution and Destruction: The Fascist Obstacle”
“The revolution is not an ideal or a utopia; it is the fundamental movement of our time. For two centuries, private life and society, art and religion, technology and science, everything has been revolutionised.”
For Alfredo M. Bonanno (1927-2023)
“That is why we are, and define ourselves, insurrectionalist anarchists. Not because we think the solution is the barricades — the barricades could be a tragic consequence of choices that are not our own — but we are insurrectionalists because we think that anarchist action must necessarily face very serious problems.”
“The Revolutionary Temper” (2023) by Robert Darnton reviewed
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.”
Josep Rafanell i Orra: “Short treatise on cosmoanarchism”
“Anarchism has always found itself in the cracks of history. It proclaims that something more than the Whole can exist, the all beyond the Whole that remains: sharing, mutual aid and their milieu of associated life; our social maladjustment; again, fragments and their compositions. From one world to another, anarchism opens the ways of a community’s…
Enzo Traverso talks about his book “Revolution”
Athens, 18 October 2023 (starting at 11:40)
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: “The Movement of Refusal”
“Protests are radically unstable. They dispel the familiarity of late-capitalist life and dissolve all of the identities at our disposal. This is the “poor beginning” Blanchot described, the unarticulated refusal. In this sense, the movement that takes place is a disembarkation, the beginning of a more extensive escape.”
Tyler McBrien: The Struggle Continues: On Vincent Bevins’s “If We Burn”
“Bevins chronicles the protest movements that made the 2010s the most politically active in history, considering why such unprecedented mass protests so often had the opposite effect from what the protesters intended. Still, rather than focusing solely on these losses, he tracks the small wins, as well as the lessons learned and edifying counterfactuals disseminated…
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.”