‘Beyond an idea of Revolution that would condemn us to be its Subjects, and in the meantime to administer the political misery that our great anticipation has in store for us. Instead, a revolutionary dynamic is something else, which we can imagine only in flashes. The cycle of riots and occupied squares that marked the…
Category: defeat
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: “From Revolution to Destitution”
“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…
Peter Gelderloos: “Geopolitics for 2024 on the probabilities of state power or revolution”
“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…
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…