“The commons can be found all around the world in different forms: from indigenous communities resisting the cutting of rainforests and Indian farmers fighting GMO crops to open source software and movements for digital rights over the internet. Main characteristics that are being found in each one of them are the direct-democratic procedures of their…
Category: power
Joy Connolly: “The Romans Tried to Save the Republic From Men Like Trump. They Failed.”
“Call him Donald Trump. But this man is also Julius Caesar, Catiline, Claudius, and a legion of other men who lived in ancient Rome, from which the American Founders drew inspiration for the political system we have today.” “How to counter the new speech of the charismatic demagogue by practicing politics that people can identify…
Applying lessons from the Sanders campaign to future struggles
“Why Bernie Sanders Came Up Short—and How That Lesson Can Fuel Future Progressive Victories: Organizers believe his campaign shows a true political revolution is possible.” An excerpt from the new book Rules for Revolutionaries by Becky Bond and Zack Exley (Chelsea Green, 2016). “Revolutions rarely succeed immediately. But when they do achieve their ultimate goal—even…
John Berger: “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations” (5/23/1968)
Rehearsing and performing the revolution: “The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality – the intensity of rehearsed awareness – may, on different occasions, vary considerably: but…
“Where is the Power in Mass Protest?”
“To what extent can a society be transformed by mass protests, by the sustained occupation of a public space? What happens when protests escalate into violence? And what comes after the revolution? The following is adapted from Sophie Pinkham’s Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine.”
“America in Populist Times: An Interview With Chantal Mouffe”
“Movements cannot be left just to the streets. I am very critical of the idea of politics as fomenting a moment of total rupture with the existing status quo. This is not how revolutions work. At some point, mobilizations will lose steam. You cannot change things only on the horizontal level of social movements. ……
Eric Foner on teaching a course on “The American Radical Tradition”
“And it’s also important to remember that all revolutions are unfinished, all triumphs incomplete, and every success or failure simply sets up the next series of struggles.”
Joshua Foa Dienstag: “Pessimism contra Trump”
“We don’t need to renew our optimism with ever more elaborate fantasies about the future. We need to deepen our pessimism and draw our strength from there.”
“Saturn devours his young: President Trump”
“Popular dreaming about Donald Trump reveals him to be a father figure who evokes half-buried fears and longings about peoples’ own fathers. … He is the embodiment of the law, and its gruelling obverse: the law is enforced precisely through its bloody transgressions. He is the cannibalistic ogre of fairy tales, the Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth, Saturn eating…