“We have escaped the grip of the workers’ movement, but are struggling to move forward. We are in a situation where successful uprisings only produce failed revolutions. Practically and theoretically, we keep hitting our heads against a wall; many are recoiling, political horror vacui, and there is not a lot to learn from history, least of…
Category: crisis
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…
pari-luttes.info: “Let us be ungovernable”
‘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…
Alain Badiou: “Thirteen theses and some comments on politics today”
“We could thus define the maximum ambition of future political work: to realise for the first time in history the first hypothesis, so that revolution will prevent war, rather than the second, i.e. that war will provoke revolution.”
Casey Harison: “The Crowd in History and the January 6, 2021 Attack on the US Capitol”
“Indeed, for those familiar with the history of crowds, January 6 has real similarities with a pattern of collective action that happened across the Atlantic World dating from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
Amir Ahmadi Arian: “Without them: In Iran, a revolution of the mind has already taken place”
“How can you tell if a society is in a revolutionary state? I wonder if you ever can. Everyone who remembers the 1979 revolution will tell you that up to the very last day, most people were living their lives as if nothing was happening. Iran today is not different. Intense, bloody clashes between protestors…
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)”
Christine Adams: “4 Cautionary Tales from the French Revolution for Today”
“The unsettled era of the French Revolution (1789–1799) offers insight to our current historical moment as the former U.S. president still refuses to accept recent election results as legitimate, firing up an already potent and dangerous White nationalist movement that feeds on social media-fueled fever dreams.”
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),…
Leo Jubault: “Memory against History: Black Lives Matter, Identity and the Revolution”
“This is a revolutionary moment; one that needed no parties or state, one that comes, as it often does, from the eruption of the memory of the oppressed. A memory that lies within specific lived experiences, but whose truth and call for justice transcends those specificities. From Rojava to Chiapas, from Yellow Jackets to Black…