‘An uprising against the dominance of economics over life is underway. The conflict spreads and draws ever larger segments of the population into an antagonistic, irreversible opposition. Fronts are opening up everywhere, outside of the places and times provided for this purpose. The assemblies of strikers make their law; the “conscious” and organized segments of…
Category: agonism
Malin Bång: “splinters of ebullient rebellion”
“We are also seeing many influential institutions, organizations, even governments gradually facing collapse when their actions and manifestations are colliding with the core values of the individuals they are made up by. We see how this friction generates a new spine of idealism with the aim to shift back the focus from simplified, one-dimensional explanations…
Kiersten Solt, V.I.: “Seven theses on destitution”
Constituent vs. destituent insurrections
Julius Gavroche: “Reading the times with Alain Badiou”
“What such movements call for are myths, myths which as “precious stones of memory” (Marcel Detienne, L’invention de la mythologie) weave a present to a past powerful enough to project a future, myths which fracture the eternal present of capitalist utility generating profaned spaces and times of collective play, of common joyful expenditure (Georges Bataille),…
Kristian Williams: ‘“Full Spectrum Resistance”: a field manual for insurgencies’
“Aric McBay’s massive, two-volume, handbook for political action, covers the fundamentals of social change, offering advice on organization, strategy, tactics, security, communication (internal and external), and so on — all illustrated with historical case studies.”
Assembling a revolutionary movement
My reflections on Robert Kramer’s movie Ice (1970) 10 June 2020
Jérôme Baschet interviewed: “History is no longer on our side”
‘What I call “liberated spaces” [espaces liberés] should not be construed as protected islands, where we live out a charming life in the midst of the surrounding disaster, but as spaces for combat. “Free space” implies that we must free ourselves from something, from what oppresses us or causes us to slowly die; it implies…
Raoul Vaneigem: “Everything Starts Here and Now”
“Peaceful insurrection is demilitarized guerilla war. It must have the self-organization of autonomous communes as its basis and goal. Our most powerful enemy isn’t so much the authority of the master as the resignation of the slaves.”
Chris Horner: “Hannah Arendt And The Lost Treasure Of The American Revolution”
“The public space of freedom was not preserved by either of the two revolutions mainly discussed in On Revolution, and we should include their failure alongside that of the Bolsheviks when we read Arendt’s appreciation of the fact that Rosa Luxemburg ‘was far more afraid of a deformed revolution than an unsuccessful one’”.
Etienne Balibar: “‘Gilets jaunes’: the meaning of the confrontation”
“That is how democracy is invented and perhaps, at the end of the day, how a regime can change. It is not a long road from the roundabout to the town hall, via the public square, which does not mean it is easy to travel. Demonstrations, popular assemblies, municipal counter-power, États Généraux or their modern…