“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: power
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…
Jean Vioulac: “Revolution and Destruction: The Fascist Obstacle”
“The revolution is not an ideal or a utopia; it is the fundamental movement of our time. For two centuries, private life and society, art and religion, technology and science, everything has been revolutionised.”
For Alfredo M. Bonanno (1927-2023)
“That is why we are, and define ourselves, insurrectionalist anarchists. Not because we think the solution is the barricades — the barricades could be a tragic consequence of choices that are not our own — but we are insurrectionalists because we think that anarchist action must necessarily face very serious problems.”
“The Revolutionary Temper” (2023) by Robert Darnton reviewed
Darnton “suggests that between the end of the war of the Austrian succession in 1748 and the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the French population underwent a series of convulsions, some as molten as others were icy, which resulted in a subtle but powerful molecular shift.”
Tyler McBrien: The Struggle Continues: On Vincent Bevins’s “If We Burn”
“Bevins chronicles the protest movements that made the 2010s the most politically active in history, considering why such unprecedented mass protests so often had the opposite effect from what the protesters intended. Still, rather than focusing solely on these losses, he tracks the small wins, as well as the lessons learned and edifying counterfactuals disseminated…
Michael A. Allen & Julie VanDusky-Allen: “The ‘Barbie’ and ‘Star Wars’ universes”
Both “Barbie” and “Andor” are useful for those who want to understand why revolutions happen and what it takes for them to happen. Their fundamental point: Before the start of any revolution, the oppressed have to first recognize their oppression.
Julius Gavroche: “In praise of riots”
The riot, the revolt, however ephemeral, urgently unmasks this reality by sabotaging the time and space of order, the temporalities and geographies of control, creating, (self)-generating, what can be called “a people”. The riot is an end in-itself; halting time, transgressing borders and limits, it tears away at the envelope of “normality”, thereby becoming a…
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…
CrimethInc.: “Learning from the Flames”
“The succession of high-intensity movements in France has showed that the conditions that could trigger a revolutionary movement are present. At the same time, it has also revealed the factors that are delaying the emergence of such a movement. Generally speaking, when violent repression extinguishes a revolt, the consequent trauma stifles the rebellious desires of…