“The explosion was always going to begin in Los Angeles. But now that the fire has started, it is beginning to expand. Protests have spread to dozens of cities across the country. [] What follows are some lessons from the battle of Los Angeles that could prove useful today, as the movement to stop the…
Category: Nota Bene
CrimethInc.: “Anarchists in the Movement against Police and White Supremacy”
From the Los Angeles Riots to the George Floyd Uprising: A timeline tracing the trajectory of anarchist contributions to uprisings against the police from the Rodney King riots of 1992 to the uprising in Minneapolis in 2020. This story has never been told in full; we hope this cursory effort will help participants in tomorrow’s…
Dylan Riley: “Reflections on an Inverted Revolution”
“We are living through an inverted revolution. The political heirs of Lenin and Gramsci are leading a right-wing transformation from the White House rather than a left-wing one from the streets. It is not the campus Marxists, but the thought leaders of the nativist right, who turned out to be the real followers of the…
Bernard Harcourt: “A Modern Counterrevolution”
First, a “counterrevolution” has been underway since the invention of counterinsurgency warfare in the 1950s and ’60s by French, British, and American commanders during the wars of independence in Algeria, Indochina, Malaya, Vietnam, and other former colonies. Those campaigns gave birth to counterinsurgency warfare logics and strategies—also known as unconventional or antiguerrilla warfare, or, as…
David Brooks: “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.”
“It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement.”
James Livingston: “Zizek Sends In The Clowns”
“How to conceive of revolution under the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves? Does radical pessimism allow us to see that our ethical principles are actually inscribed and faintly legible in those circumstances, so that our project need not be plotted as an escape—a prison break—from the benighted past? A better way to put…
Slavoj Žižek: “Why a Communist Should Assume Life Is Hell”
‘There is absolutely no contradiction between a “pessimist” view of our world as a valley of tears, of our life itself as a decaying corpse of a dead god, of non-being that is better than being, and a dedication to Communism. Today’s Communist has to accept the immanent despair of the human condition and propose…
Alex Zamalin in Conversation with Aaron Robertson on the Political Power of American Countercultures:Dreams of Liberation
“There is individual freedom, but there is also the collective, political level of freedom. I think the attempt to combine the two is what makes countercultural movements so unique—and why I think their account of freedom is revolutionary.”
Robert Darnton Interviewed by Disha Karnad Jani: “The Revolutionary Temper”
“Darnton traces how the antecedents to revolution circulated among the Parisian public in the decades before the storming of the Bastille, through their everyday oppositions to the rising price of bread, the overreaches of the monarchy, and the policing of poor neighborhoods. Through their growing sense that the powerful in their society were not governing as they should,…
Alexander Aerts: “Alexandre Kojève: Bildung in a Revolutionary Cell”
“Kojève thought that this revolutionary terror formed the necessary condition for the creation of freedom to come. The realisation of this ‘actual’ freedom came about with the eventual dissolution of ‘absolute’ freedom. In 1918, with Russia standing at the crossroads of history, the constitution of the Bolshevik regime and the previous period of war communism…