‘An uprising against the dominance of economics over life is underway. The conflict spreads and draws ever larger segments of the population into an antagonistic, irreversible opposition. Fronts are opening up everywhere, outside of the places and times provided for this purpose. The assemblies of strikers make their law; the “conscious” and organized segments of…
Tag: France
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…
Jérôme Baschet interviewed: “History is no longer on our side”
‘What I call “liberated spaces” [espaces liberés] should not be construed as protected islands, where we live out a charming life in the midst of the surrounding disaster, but as spaces for combat. “Free space” implies that we must free ourselves from something, from what oppresses us or causes us to slowly die; it implies…
lundi matin: “A strange time/weather”
“Furio Jesi distinguishes between revolt and revolution, which cut across two different times. Revolt is not an aborted revolution. Revolt is the time of myth, a time that bursts in, that breaks historical causality. … The revolutionary parties or any structured organisation are thus incapable of taking part in the revolt and even less of…
“We are here, even if Macron doesn’t want it: One year of the Gilets Jaunes”
“On November 16th the Gilets Jaunes movement marked one year since it burst onto the scene and threw a spanner in the works of President Macron’s agenda.”
Gabriel Bristow: “Yellow fever: Populist pangs in France”
“The movement has remained relatively resolute in its negativity. The refusal to negotiate with the government and the rejection of representation and ‘recuperation’ by political parties is near total. … The gilets jaunes have invented a repertoire of action from next to nothing, settling on roundabouts (precisely where things are supposed to circulate) and storming…
lundi matin: “The gilets jaunes: Insurrection at the end times of capital”
‘Rather than expressing the revolution of capital, it seems more accurate to speak of a movement which acts, in the first place, as a resistance to this revolution of capital (3) and acts as an “analyser” of the crisis of the reproduction of capitalist social relations.’
Raoul Vaneigem interviewed On alienation, the Situationists and everyday revolution
“The movement of self-managing assemblies that is emerging today is the heir (though it is not yet fully aware of it) of all the struggles for emancipation that have shaken history. Where they stopped, where they were crushed, they will resume and, without even mentioning victory or defeat, they will start again without interruption, like…
“Looking back-forward at the gilets jaunes: A taking stock”
“We share an unfinished debate on the yellow vests’ movement, on what is or was radical within it, and where it failed, if indeed it did so. We begin with a critical appraisal of the movement, followed by a more apologetic note, and in turn a response. What separates the two sides of this debate…
Jacques Fradin: “The insurrection of the yellow vests and the revolution of the revolution”
“The uprising of the yellow vests can be interpreted as a resurgence of the oldest movements of revolt … Or, rather, this uprising can also be interpreted as the first insurrection of a new revolutionary era, the era of the revolution of the revolution – symptomatic of a new political era that emerges by dissolving…