“We as activists, as organizers, have to make ourselves and our communities ungovernable. I know you’ve heard that term before. That means what it says. We have to make it so that we create a new kind of political system of our own, whether it’s dual power or revolutionary direct democracy, whatever we want to…
Category: founding
Stacy Schiff: “The Boston Tea Party Was More Than That. It Was a Riot.”
“We do not care for the revolutionary spirit to survive the revolution. The revolution, however, goes nowhere without it.”
Andrew R. Detch: “Will the Real George Washington Please Stand Up?”
“the ongoing efforts of the political right to claim the legacy of the American Revolution both oversimplifies the complex legacy of the American Revolution and threatens the very fabric of American identity.”
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’”.
Yavor Tarinski interviewed on “Direct democracy and the passion for political participation”
‘If we want create a radically democratic and ecological society, we will have to abandon all bureaucratic and exploitative means. It is not enough to consume ethically or vote for the lesser evil. We have to build democratic and resilient communities capable of confederating with each other so as to tackle large-scale issues. As Castoriadis…
Richard Youngs: “After Protest: Pathways beyond Mass Mobilization”
‘The case studies show that the standard criticism that activists singularly fail to move “from protest to politics” is no longer entirely fair—even if this might have been valid to some extent a decade or more ago. Yet they also suggest that maintaining effective postprotest activism can be far harder than organizing an influential protest…
James L. Gelvin: “Turkish attack on Syria endangers a remarkable democratic experiment by the Kurds”
‘The key to understanding the Rojava project, as those involved often refer to it, is the notion of “confederalism.” In this form of government, local units – in this case, Kurdistan’s “autonomous regions” – come together in a federation yet retain a great deal of autonomy.’
Jeffrey Ostler: “The Great Fear of 1776”
“It may be unsettling to consider the creation of the United States as a genocidal project, but the experiences of many of eastern North America’s Indigenous people led them to think of it in precisely this way. Examining their reasons does not necessarily mandate agreement with their conclusion, but it does ask us to take…
James C. Scott interviewed
On revolution and resistance
Tikva Honig-Parnass: “A community in arms: the Indigenous roots of the EZLN”
‘By building a “democracy from below,” the Zapatistas recognize the leadership of, and carry on a long tradition of resistance by Indigenous communities in Chiapas.’