“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: defeat
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…
Gerardo Munoz: “Mario Tronti: Revolutionary Adventurer in the Interregnum”
“It’s hard to think of another European intellectual who has gone from the communist party culture and the horizon of revolutionary politics (he was cofounder of the influential journal Classe Operaia) to parliamentary participation (as senator of the Italian left Partito Democratico) and, finally, to a thorough engagement with the theological-political vocabulary of Western Christianity, going as…
Mario Tronti interviewed: “I am defeated”
Nostalgia for revolutions?“No, if anything the twentieth century was the century of revolutions. But not only that. Where are the grand ideas, the great literature, the grand politics or the great art? I don’t seen anything like what the first half of the twentieth century produced.”
Jamie Allinson: “The Actuality of Counter-Revolution”
“Counter-revolutions are difficult to circumscribe because they belong both to the past that preceded the revolution and make the future that succeeds it. Or to put the issue in more prosaic language: when does counter-revolution begin? And, what does it counter – does counter-revolution simply restore the past, or make its own new present? What…
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…
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.”
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…
Paulius Vijeikis: “Revolution in progress: Voices of Belarusians in exile”
“The Belarus Revolution started in 2020 after a rigged presidential election. It ended, at least to outward appearances, with President Lukashenka’s brutal repression and stricter outlawing of future protests. But, for many, the struggle continues: a new study on protestors’ recollections refutes the perception that the revolution failed.”
Mona El-Ghobashy: “The Arab Uprisings and the Many Meanings of Revolution”
“After ten years as the Arab region’s only functioning democracy, Tunisia is now imperiled by a presidential strongman who in 2021 dissolved parliament and attacked the judiciary, and in 2022 rewrote the constitution to reflect his plebiscitary conception of direct democracy. Egypt is governed by a personalized military dictatorship that incarcerates or eliminates all forms…