new edition (2017)
Category: tragic politics
An interview with Enzo Traverso: “The Left is a history of defeats”
The failures of the Left: “And even when revolutionaries did manage to overthrow the established powers-that-be, things almost always went badly… That is why melancholia is a fundamental dimension of left-wing culture. It was long repressed by a dialectical vision of history: however painful defeats were, they never put in question the idea that socialism…
Zeynep Tufekci: “Does a Protest’s Size Matter?”
‘I participated in the antiwar protests of February 2003 — at that point, likely the largest global protest in history, with events in more than 600 cities. I assumed the United States and its allies could not ignore a protest of that size. But President George W. Bush, dismissing the protesters as a “focus group,”…
Astra Taylor: “Against Activism”
From organizers to activists: “We used to call ourselves, variously, revolutionaries, radicals, militants, socialists, communists, organizers,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a radical historian with fifty years of social movement experience, told me. The rise of the word activist, she speculated, corresponds with what she describes as a broader “discrediting of the left.” It was only after the…
Ezra Klein: “Trump thrives on heightening the divisions in American politics.”
Winning and governing by division: ‘If Obama’s contention was that there’s no “them,” only “us,” Trump’s contention is that there really is a “them” — a “them” of immigrants and Muslims and terrorists and Black Lives Matter activists and elites and crooked journalists — and so it’s all the more important for the “us” to…
Micah White: “Without a path from protest to power, the Women’s March will end up like Occupy.”
“It’s time to consider what happens the day after.” ‘Without a clear path from march to power, the protest is destined to be an ineffective feelgood spectacle adorned with pink pussy hats. Today’s social activists have succumbed to one of the most enduring myths of contemporary American protest: the comforting belief that if you can…
Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato on the “biopolitical governmentality of war”
“To our enemies”: ’29. In short, it is a question of drawing the lessons from what seems to us like the failure of the thought of ’68 which we have inherited, even in our inability to think and construct a collective war machine equal to the civil war unleashed in the name of neoliberalism and…
The Editors of “Salvage”: “Saturn devours his young: President Trump”
‘There remains an immense suspicion of political pessimism. Salvage has always stressed that our pessimism, born of analysis, is not at all coterminous with surrender – the opposite – and that it yearns to be wrong. At this moment, this fist in the face, any response other than a pessimistic sense of the growing gulf…
Cliston Brown: “Dear Democrats: Nobody Cares About Your Feelings”
“Conservatives are much more clear-eyed—and that’s why they win so often. And here’s another, closely-related lesson Democrats would do well to learn: nobody cares about your feelings. You can march, yell, and sign petitions all you want, but your voice won’t be heard until you figure out where the correct pressure points are located. Conservatives…
Micah White: “Without a path from protest to power, the Women’s March will end up like Occupy.”
“Social activists have succumbed to one of the most enduring myths of contemporary American protest. It’s time to consider what happens the day after. The question every protester should ask: what will happen after the march? … Without a clear path from march to power, the protest is destined to be an ineffective feelgood spectacle…