“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…
Category: the common
Kristin Ross interviewed: The commune as a form of life
“For me, Les Soulèvements de la Terre are a contemporary example of a Commune form because they have managed to create a common front, and they have created it from very different groups and people. It’s a very specific form. It’s not a political party, it’s not a class- or ethnicity-based organisation, and yet it’s…
Laura Vicente: “Mujeres Libres: A genealogy of anarchist feminism”
‘This was “their revolution of life”, a long-term transformation that began to change ways of life, personal relationships, work, “care” and an endless number of other aspects, paying attention to the small, to the quiet, to the intimate, to the breath of each body. These women glimpsed other possible worlds and, despite the defeat, they…
Carolyn Eichner: “Women at the barricades”
“The Paris Commune exploded onto the world stage. At the intersection of political developments, resistance movements, emerging liberatory ideologies and community-based organisations, the Commune resulted from the political will of a wide range of actors to embrace the revolutionary opportunity, and put hopes and ideas into action. They drew not only on their prior liberatory…
“In a Hospital Ward, the Wounds of a Failed Democracy Don’t Heal”
“Tunisia’s road to democracy began with a self-immolation, and such cases have filled hospital burn wards ever since, as elected leaders failed to deliver on a promise of prosperity.”
David A. Bell: “The Experiment: The life and afterlife of the Paris Commune”
“The ghost of the Commune continued to haunt the regime that had killed it and helped to push the Third Republic and future regimes in the more progressive direction they eventually took. For all of the contradictions that accompanied its short life, the Commune, as Carolyn Eichner insists, played a key historical role.”
Mark R. Beissinger: “The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion”
“Using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion surveys, and engaging examples from around the world, Mark Beissinger explores the causes and consequences of the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He investigates the struggle for control over public space, why revolutionary contention has grown more pacified over…
Chiara Bottici: “Anarchafeminism”
“But if freedom is both the means and the end, then one could also envisage a world free from the very notion of gender as well as the oppressive structures that it generated. Because gendered bodies are still the worldwide objects of exploitation and domination, we need an anarchafeminist manifesto here and now. But the…
Amador Fernández-Savater: “15M in the Spanish labyrinth”
“15M invents a place from which to feel, think and act with autonomy, a space that does not sell promises or solutions, that does not ask for adherence, but rather invites anyone to elaborate questions about and take actions with regard to life in common.”
Sumanta Banerjee: “Embers of the Paris Commune”
“This year we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871 – the biggest urban insurrection of the nineteenth century, that led to the setting up of a grass roots based popular government in Paris, albeit for only about two months, before it was crushed by the Versailles troops at the end…