“Between March and May 1871 the workers of Paris ran their city as a collective, democratic government of the workers known as the Paris Commune.”
Category: tragic politics
Ronan Burtenshaw & Seán Byers: “Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution”
“For the Irish left, neither the traditional nor revisionist narrative will do. In this moment of renewed working-class politics on the island, what is needed is an excavation of Ireland’s revolutionary period that embraces the struggle for independence in the context of the democratic and social revolutions many of its participants aspired to.”
Jérôme Baschet interviewed: ‘History Is No Longer On Our Side’
“It has recently been said that there is a major cleavage within the thought of emancipation. For some, it is necessary to preserve, or rediscover, the classical parameters of modernity, and in particular a conception of History understood as a triumphant advance of Progress. … On the other side of the dividing line are all…
Joseph Fronczak: “Melancholy and Mobilisation”
A review of Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traverso
Chris Horner: “Hannah Arendt And The Lost Treasure Of The American Revolution”
“The public space of freedom was not preserved by either of the two revolutions mainly discussed in On Revolution, and we should include their failure alongside that of the Bolsheviks when we read Arendt’s appreciation of the fact that Rosa Luxemburg ‘was far more afraid of a deformed revolution than an unsuccessful one’”.
Jeremy Popkin: “Vive la révolution!”
“Must radical political change generate uncontainable violence? The French Revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale.”
Cédric Durand: “It should have been a great decade for the European left – what happened? “
“If there’s a single moment that characterises the end of this moment, it’s the tragic Greek betrayal of July 2015. In this deadly summer, the Greek people voted against (“oxi”) the bailout conditions imposed by the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF. But this victory was transformed by Syriza – the only left-of-social-democracy…
William Dalrymple: Review of “The Buried” by Peter Hessler – Life, death and revolution in Egypt
‘In this scheme, the fall of Mubarak, the chaos of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the restoration of authoritarian rule under Sisi also follow rhythms familiar to Egyptian history. Hessler sees a mirror in the story of the pharoah Akhenaten – a failed revolutionary whose attempt to introduce monotheism was crushed in “what was possibly the…
Alex von Tunzelmann: “The Evil Repercussions of the American Revolution”
A review of TO BEGIN THE WORLD OVER AGAIN: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe (2019) by Matthew Lockwood. “He finds it at the root of a long list of ills, including increasing authoritarianism within Britain itself and the wider British Empire, the failure of Irish, Indian and Peruvian movements against imperialism, the Russian…
“Everything is burning already; Let us burn together!”
“if we want peace, we will first go through war. It is total war, planetary, nature defending itself against the civilisational monster; riotous war, protean, of a world bursting with rage to live against the costumed puppets that bleed it white. This war is already taking place everywhere, and is intensifying devilishly in the immense…