Revoltutions of our Time is written by The Peoples Want, a global network of grassroots collectives, organizations, and activists working to build a new form of international solidarity “from below,” prioritizing popular movements over state interests. The network started in 2019 from gatherings initiated by The Syrian Canteen, a mutual aid space and kitchen in Paris run by Syrian political exiles. It grew out of international events supporting uprisings in Lebanon, Iraq, Chile, Algeria, Iran, and other regions. By 2022, after several international gatherings, participants formalized an autonomous network structure to connect global struggles. The group published Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto, detailing their perspective on 21st-century revolutionary internationalism.

Void Network supports The Peoples Want from the summer of 2026 and after the contacts established during the book presentation’s tour Gen Z Makes History in Asia.

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One sunny day in the suburbs of Paris, back in 2019, people from all round the world came together to attend the first ever “The Peoples Want” gathering. Paris is a colonial metropolis, but it is also a crossroads, a place where for many centuries exiles have gathered. The name we gave of our meeting was intended as a tribute to a cry that shook the world for more than a decade: “The People Want the Downfall of the Regime.” By swapping “Peoples” for People, we were expressing an aspiration.

A few years earlier, this rallying cry was brought to Paris in the luggage of Syrian revolutionaries. An encounter with local dissidents gave birth to a cooperative called “The Syrian Canteen.” It was intended as a warm place in which to recoup strength and courage, where people could break out of their isolation, where the most intense debates revolved around food and revolution; and where, gradually, a community of exiles and friends from several countries was able to coalesce.

It was out of this community that ‘The Peoples Want’ arose, as a series of transnational gatherings year after year attended by revolutionaries from all over the world. We shared our experiences and discussed what we were trying to build and fight for in our territories and neighborhoods. We took time to get to know each other over large banquets and parties, heard inspiring speeches and participated in discussions that were sometimes difficult. Above all, we allowed ourselves to imagine that the future held possibilities beyond the repressive blanket of lead that had descended.

The last of these meetings set us on a new course. Revolutionaries from forty countries attended, and thousands of people came to meet them. Many expressed the desire to build something more sustainable, to go further. This energy proved that there was work to be done, that we were just at the beginning. So, the canteen remained a canteen, and the network began to draw its own constellation.

The process of writing this text began in the summer of 2023. It consisted in nine people from different parts of the world—Lebanon, France, Syria, Tunisia, Chile, Kurdistan, and Iran—coming together to establish a first draft. Nine contributors who, each in their own way, had taken part in the uprisings of our time. Different versions of this text were then offered for discussion from Santiago to Beirut, from Lyon to Buenos Aires, from the Massif Central to the Galloway Hills via the Beqaa Valley. Along the way, it was debated, reworked, fleshed out, and in places changed entirely. From places of exile, from sites of struggle, North, South, East and West, our words have been enriched by contributions from participants in the revolutions in Egypt, Sudan, and Iraq, the peasant revolts in India, the feminist wave in Latin America, the movement for George Floyd in the United States, the uprising in Sri Lanka, the Palestinian and Ukrainian resistance, and many others.

Putting ideological considerations aside, foregoing dominant discourses and TV studio geopolitics, we traveled to engage with bodies in struggle, then pooled our experiences. From these many encounters, and the illumination they produced, we tried to grasp what was at stake, and make the most of many uncertainties and apparent contradictions, to analyze forces at play and understand our most immediate challenges. We then set ourselves a series of short, medium, and long-term objectives. The intensification of open warfare—in Ukraine, Sudan, Palestine, and Lebanon, to mention only the most recent—and the reinforcement of the bloc logic this implies, seemed a major obstacle. How could we not appear out of step, when drawing up plans for a new internationalism, at a time when bombs are going off everywhere?

Recognizing ourselves

“Nos costó tanto encontrarnos, no nos soltemos”ⁱ

It was so hard to find each other, let’s never again be apart

The memories of our era are filled with images of its ongoing collapse; forests in flames, seas turned into graveyards, epidemics, famines, and murderous invasions …

But we could choose to remember something else. We could remember the power of the uprisings that shook the countryside and cities of the world, sparing no continent, no geography. Time and again, in the midst of this suffocating atmosphere of the end of civilization, people had risen against fatalism. Governments, regimes, and a few heads fell. People returned to knock on history’s door.

Hundreds of police stations set on fire by protesters in Iran. A thousand public buildings attacked by rebels from working-class neighborhoods in France. Giant barricades on Maïdan in Kyiv, banks stormed by insurgents in Lebanon. Everywhere, violent insurrection offered a response to the violence of humiliation.

Those who lived through the ransacking of triumphal arches, the invasion of presidential swimming pools, or participated in furious dances echoing across borders, remember the rage. The rage, but also beauty liberated in defiance of sadness. We remember the warmth of a library built under siege, late-night conversations in improvised street kitchens, splendid walls adorned with slogans, words of wit and messages of love, those tens of thousands of voices singing in unison that nothing would ever be the same again.

Let them repaint the walls and re-make their statues. They can send us into exile. They can lock us up and slaughter our people. A flame burns deep in our hearts through the hardest, coldest, most sinister moments.

In revolt, we have regained our dignity. From continent to continent, from our exile, in our travels and in our struggles, we have found each other. In the clash of street battles, gestures seen and then replicated in different countries, words echoed across languages, we have recognized each other. We understood that we belong to a single transnational struggle and that we stand against an internationally organized elite. We know that if we remain isolated, we will achieve nothing.

The bitterness of our defeats, and our refusal to accept them as final, has engendered the desire to get to know each other. We have begun to weave a network of planetary connections, from front lines to popular assemblies, from feminist strikes to resistance committees, from occupied traffic circles to occupied forests, and have discovered a common sensibility.

If the avant-gardes claimed to be marching one step ahead of the masses, we know that we are marching one step behind the popular uprisings of recent years. We have grown in their wake; they were our best school. Now we want to weave the fabric of a generational experience. By generation, we mean that which connects all those, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, religion or language, who have recognized the emergence of a new revolutionary cycle and felt a tremor in the depths of their hearts and bodies.

None of the ideologies, none of the political roadmaps we have inherited is capable of grasping the tumult of our times. We have not sought to create new ones. But we do have a notion of the method that will enable us to find paths together: it’s called internationalism.

The revolutionary task has in part become a task of translation. Sharing and translating our different perceptions of reality, and circulating them, are the first steps in this method. This text is designed to highlight salient points of our first cross-analyses. It attempts to organize them in a way that may be useful to anyone wishing to take an active part in what happens next.

Palestine (2000, 2005, 2020), Argentina (2001), Kabylia (2001), Georgia (2003, 2024), Lebanon (2005, 2019), France (2005, 2018, 2023), Iceland (2008), Iran (2009, 2017, 2019, 2022), Kyrgyzstan (2010), Thailand (2013, 2020), Brazil (2013) South Korea (2016), UK (2011), USA (2011, 2014, 2015, 2020), Syria (2011), Morocco (2011), Libya (2011), Tunisia (2011), Spain (2011), Greece (2008, 2011), Egypt (2011), Sri Lanka (2022), Yemen (2011), Bahrain (2011), Quebec (2012), Turkey (2013), Ukraine (2004, 2014), Burkina Faso (2014), Bakur-Kurdistan (2015), Nicaragua (2018), Iraq (2019), Catalonia (2019), Ecuador (2019), Belarus (2006, 2021), Kyrgyzstan (2005, 2010, 2020), Turkey (2013), Chile (2019), India (2019), Hong Kong (2014, 2018), Haiti (2019), Algeria (2019), Sudan (2013; 2018; 2019), Colombia (2021), Burma (2021), Kazakhstan (2022), Peru (2009, 2022), Senegal (2022-2023), Bangladesh (2024) …

This is not just an incomplete and unfinished list of the revolts of our time. Behind every place, behind every date, lie hundreds of thousands of faces, dreams, and lives. The following lines are a tribute to the insurgents who took part in these events; a tribute to those we have found, those we have yet to meet and those we will never see again. To those who fell because they loved life. It is for our own sakes, but also for theirs, that we have decided to take to the road again; inspired by their presence and their energy. These words are dedicated to them.

Birth of our power

/ The margins attack the center / From the margins to the people / The fall of the regime / The plan we missed /

A fifteenth-century Arab thinker, watching his civilization crumble from bathing in superfluous luxury, worriedly predicted: the margins will put an end to Empire. What better image of this threat from the margins than Delhi in 2020, encircled by millions of peasants who had been long ignored. Peasants who, after the biggest strike in human history—a strike of 250 million people—set up peasant councils, the Mahapanchayat, all over the country, saying: The Mahapanchayat are the new parliaments of the people, and the untouchables will be at their center.

The margins attack the center

As the uprisings of our time have shown, there is no global revolutionary subject. Black people in the United States, women and sexual and gender dissidents in Latin America, Baluchis or Kurds in Iran, Indigenous peoples in Ecuador or Peru, youth from the working-class districts of Santiago and Tripoli. The revolt was led, above all, by those on the margins.

To be on the margins is to be part of the whole, but outside it. The margins include those who are carefully kept on the sidelines, not too far away to keep the machine running, but not too close to disturb; both outside and at the service of the centers. The centers are where power lies; state or capital city, multinational corporation, colonial settlers, bosses, patriarchs.

A revolt is limited when those who trigger it fail to rally other types of anger. Facing the centers, the great architects of our separation, the challenge of our uprisings was to ensure our encounter. Encounters between different segments of the margins, but also encounters between those on the margins and dissidents from the centers; those who defy the powers from which they benefit, such as the inhabitants of colonial metropolises who support liberation struggles in the colonies.

Where a segment of the margins, such as peasants in India, Indigenous people in Ecuador, high school students in Chile, or Black people in the United States, was joined by a large part of the population, uprisings have managed to achieve victories. Although these were often partial and provisional: the withdrawal of reforms in India and Ecuador, the opening of the constituent process in Chile, and the pseudo-overhaul of several local police forces in the United States.

In an uprising, encounters between fighters from the margins and dissidents from the centers gives rise to breaches that contain trenchant possibilities, where ambiguities and contradictions coexist. In the United States, the uprising triggered by the assassination of George Floyd was joined by white demonstrators in large numbers. After the first days of insurrection, these demonstrators tried to form a security cordon between the police and Black insurgents in order to ‘protect’ them. Without even realizing, they were helping to neutralize anger and redraw racial boundaries that the insurrectionary movement had momentarily made less rigid. Nothing is a given in the encounter between dissidents from the centers and fighters from the margins—or between different sections of the margins themselves—but the moments of uprising were unique opportunities to shift the boundaries beyond compartmentalized milieus.

Where such encounters did not take place, the revolts multiplied in successive waves, but at a certain stage dispersed, fragmented, or were repressed. This was the case in Iran, where it was mainly the declassed middle classes who revolted in 2009, and working class men in 2017 and 2019. It wasn’t until 2022 that the regime faltered, when all components of society rose up behind women. In France, white dissidents of the centers didn’t join the youth of working class neighborhoods in 2005 or 2023, and the middle classes or unionized workers took little part in the Yellow Vest uprising of 2018. Without these encounters, regimes hold, governments buy time.

From the margins to the people

In the heart of Paris, during the insurrectionary evening of 1 December 2018, after breaking down the doors of the former Paris stock exchange, a Black teenager, standing alongside a white protester in a yellow vest and an activist of Moroccan origin, enthusiastically blurts out, “It’s us the people … Wallah (I swear on Allah), it’s us the people!”

The revolt dismantles the separations produced by the centers; reconstituting the people. In Sudan, it was through meeting in the revolutionary processions of 2019 and at the sit-in in al-Qiyada Square that people from all parts of the country found themselves sharing their experience of the injustices that affected them all, although in different ways. It was in revolt that they first encountered each other, chanting together: “Unity is the people’s choice!”

The uprising shatters the people which was constructed and rigidified by national novels, fascist ideologies and dogmatic activists. Through their calls for unity, the margins of the uprising have often reinvented the people, in line with their own realities. That explains why, in France, a predominantly white movement like the Yellow Vests was so strong among colonized populations in Guadeloupe or Reunion; why a Black woman, the son of a Portuguese immigrant, and a young Romani could be found among the movement’s main leaders; why a small business owner and a working class woman could hold a barricade together. In Sri Lanka, the 2022 uprising brought together, not without friction, Buddhist monks, queer people, Sinhalese and Tamils, revealing the people for what they are: plural and in the making.

Weaving together the different fragments of the margins is done through speech as well as gestures. Syrian Arab revolutionaries understood this well when they used the Kurdish word “azadi” (freedom) as a call to Kurds; the Turkmen of Iran when they sang “Kurdistan the eyes and light of Iran” to bring together historically antagonistic minorities; the use of the Mapuche flag in the 2019 demonstrations in Chile, and the Kabyle one in Algeria during the Hirak. In the heat of uprising, these gestures were all attempts to extend the people.

Yet, no segment of the margins is capable of unifying the diversity of people indefinitely. Unity is enabled by the sharing of experiences from the margins—insurrectionary practices, resistance in the face of repression, and the organization of immediate survival—more than by visions of change or ideological convictions. While regimes were relentless in their efforts to divide the movement by all possible means, pre-existing divisions also returned at the first opportunity, undermining the unity born of revolt. This leaves us with a major question: how can we maintain our unity beyond the peak of an uprising?

A people is always several things at once. It can be deceived, oppressed, participate in its own defeat or that of others. It can be divided with each fragment fighting each other. But a people can also, on rare occasions, rally around a collective will to free itself from the political class that governs it. It’s only through coming together, even if ephemerally, despite obstacles and contradictions, that the various segments of the margins, together with dissidents of the centers, have created a people with a new meaning. A people with revolutionary potential.

The fall of the regime

In Egypt, Tunisia and Ukraine, regimes fell. In Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Iraq, governments were overthrown. Yet even when movements seemed momentarily victorious, nowhere did the uprisings succeed in preventing a return to the established order or the arrival of the worst. Insurgents everywhere were painfully reminded that replacing a government or a constitution is not synonymous with threatening the powerful. The uprisings failed to reach the core of regimes.

An uprising is the eruption of the real movement, the self-assertion of those who have been pushed out of their humanity, dispossessed of their own strength. In this way, it signals both to the centers and to the margins themselves that the status quo can no longer continue. It fractures the legitimacy of established powers. The question remains, what to do with this fracture?

In 2022, Sri Lanka found itself on the verge of tipping over. Government buildings were occupied, the president had fled the country, and the army and police didn’t dare intervene. In a way, revolutionaries had won the first round. But not knowing what to do with the ministries, they returned them. As elsewhere, revolutionaries were beaten by the shock of their own victory.

In many uprisings, in the face of our paralysis, politicians and technocrats of all stripes did not miss the opportunity offered by our weakness. The Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia and Egypt, the military chiefs in Libya and Algeria, the “official” opposition of the Syrian National Council: the crowd of opportunists didn’t wait for us to finish mourning our dead or nursing our wounded. While our barricades were still in place, they went to negotiate a “political outcome,” synonymous with the end of the revolt.

How can we forget Boric, subsequently elected President of Chile, rushing into the halls of Congress in 2019, while the crowd was still confronting the police in the streets, to sign a biased agreement for a constitutional process to contain the revolt alongside the ruling political parties? As is so often the case, the institutional game intervened to restore order and prevent the country from plunging into the unknown. “If Piñera falls, we all fall,” said a leftwing Chilean senator with lucidity. Politicians and bourgeois of both right and left always prefer to accept cosmetic change and a few concessions to ward off the advent of a revolution that would really threaten their power and wealth. To prevent a profound revolution.

During the Maïdan uprising in Kyiv in 2014, the ministry doors slammed shut once the regime was deposed by the street. Opposition parties were quick to propose a “transitional government,” which they paraded on the central grandstand of the occupied square asserting their legitimacy. The insurgents were not fooled, but after three months of insurrection they were exhausted, so the subterfuge came to pass. Insurgents thought they could keep a close eye on the new government and even proposed “people’s” deputies. They pressured the new government by occupying a number of ministries to bring about institutional change and threatened to launch another Maïdan. But above all, it was a signal for everyone to go home.

In Sri Lanka, Chile, and Ukraine, for the uprising to have gone further it would have been necessary to face the uncertainty of knowing how the country was going to feed itself, where to get fuel or medicine, or how to defend themselves against foreign military aggression. To know how to survive and live, rebels would have had to answer questions of scale that, for the moment, are beyond their grasp: what to do with state institutions, international organizations, the army, or foreign debt? How could they overcome obstacles without creating new dependencies? History has taught us that compromises often lead to concessions, i.e. variations of the same, rather than alternatives. So how do we keep fighting without falling into the abyss?

To do so, we need more than just material assurances. Throwing yourself into the unknown is an act of faith. It’s done when there appears to be no choice. Or out of conviction; when you believe in something so deeply that it seems worth the risk. But what exactly do we believe in? What is our response to uncertainty? The days when socialism was on the table for every uprising are over. Without a map or compass, rebels have thrown themselves into the arms of those who had a plan: the reactionaries, the liberals, or the military. And those of us who ignited the revolt were left to contemplate, comment, and criticize—at least those of us who were still free, or alive.

The plan we missed

The irony is that perhaps the plan was there all along, right before our eyes.

Much has been said about the horizontal, decentralized nature of our revolts. About the extent to which the big traditional organizations were absent, or incapable of monopolizing the “leadership” of the emerging movements. Leftists around the world appeared overwhelmed by the intensity and inventiveness of this wave of uprisings.

As a result, each uprising, each struggle, saw the emergence—independently of the directives of this or that leader, party, or organization—of new forms of popular organization adapted to the needs of each revolt. Occupations of squares, buildings, or universities in Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Hong Kong; local councils in Syria and resistance committees in Sudan; territorial assemblies in Chile and Colombia; feminist assemblies around the world; roundabouts taken over by Yellow Vests in France.

In each of these experiences, insurgents found themselves organizing the offensive as well as the day-to-day life of the uprising. Assemblies were held to discuss strategy and prepare for highway blockades, demonstrations, and assaults on centers of power. We tried to organize security and self-defense, geolocated repressive forces, prepared legal defenses, and took care of the wounded. We built camps and shacks, fed crowds through ollas communes (popular kitchens), and occupied and cultivated vegetable gardens. Everywhere, we tried to ensure the proliferation of our forces and our possibilities for action.

In Syria, revolutionaries went even further. In territories from which the regime was ousted, insurgents managed to run entire towns, hospitals, mills, power stations, and distribute food by themselves for several years. The hundreds of local councils in the liberated territories were testimony to the fact that Syria’s future lay neither in the hands of the National Council (opposition in exile), nor in those of armed groups. Yet revolutionaries didn’t dare claim that it was they themselves who might actually be building an alternative to the regime. It was the demonstration in deed that, even under bombs and siege, cut off from the world and facing ruthless repression, people were capable of governing themselves.

In an uprising, we’ll always face forces who won’t hesitate to take over the palaces. And their priority will always be to defeat nascent forms of popular organization. Not being recognized as serious or legitimate by national and international forces, rebels were sidelined. Faced with these threats, we generally failed to influence the outcome of revolts. We were either unable or unwilling to take charge of the aftermath of the uprising. We failed to establish ourselves as a power.

In Sudan too, during the last decade of struggle (2013-2023), resistance committees were set up in cities and neighborhoods. They organized both mobilizations and popular mutual aid. Year after year, revolt after revolt, they’ve grown in strength and experience. Following the ousting of President Omar al-Bashir, some opposition organizations decided to participate in the civilian-military Transitional Council. The resistance committees largely opposed this decision in order to remain faithful to the revolution’s demand to remove all powers linked to the military. As a result, they themselves embodied popular legitimacy. Freed from opposition organizations and strengthened by this legitimacy, the hundreds of committees drafted and then voted on a proposal for the country’s future: the Charter for the Establishment of People’s Authority. Only in Sudan did the movement’s grassroots committees dare to claim revolutionary power. Elsewhere, one of the great errors was to have reduced the emerging popular powers to the means of the revolution, rather than a unique combination of its means and ends. As a prefiguration of a possible revolutionary future.

These experiments offer a wealth of lessons for revolutionaries; they join and update a long history of popular power. It’s a history that no textbook mentions: that of the Comandos Comunales and Cordones Industriales in Chile (1970-73), the Quilombos of Brazil (1550-2024), the sans-culottes sections of the French Revolution (1789-93), the Caracoles of Chiapas and the Workers’ Councils of Russia and Bavaria (1905, 1918-1919), the communes of Paris (1871), Morelos (1913) and Kronstadt (1921). And many others.

We interpret what we’ve lived through as an ongoing era of insurrection. What some quickly dismissed as defeat, we see as the birth of a worldwide movement of revolt for dignity. We look our failures straight in the eye, and prepare ourselves for victories to come. Our starting point is all those places to which popular power has returned, sometimes ephemerally, sometimes more tenaciously, to give us back our strength.

Finding the emergency brake

/ Behind every fascism lies a failed revolution / The age of exhaustion / A State of Emergency in every state / Finding the horizon /

The beginning of this decade underlines a simple, but painful truth: as revolution progresses, so counter-revolution grows harsh.

Recent uprisings have shown that all regimes, whatever their nature, are radically out of step with popular aspirations. Unable to rekindle faith in their moribund projects, the first response of those in power was terror. The uprisings left martyrs, prisoners, and exiles in their wake. The militarization of territories and the criminalization of struggles intensifies, while enforced disappearance and torture multiplies. To add to the national horror, Russian, Iranian, French, and American generals flocked to the bedsides of threatened regimes. Tear gas, bombs, and ‘French policing expertise’ were offered to Ben Ali, German policemen and Israeli cybersecurity systems to Chile, Iranian militias and Russian bombs to the aid of Bashar al-Assad. The crushing of our uprisings was not just national, it was international.

After the uprisings, what survives gains strength and even organizes itself, and is more often than not some form of reaction. Everywhere, the ruling classes fiercely defend their interests, whatever the cost. Across the globe, the only organized forces that seem to outlive the uprisings are conservative at best, fascist at worst. The last decade’s uprisings have been brought to a halt by a large-scale and multifaceted response: a violent counter-revolution.

Behind every fascism lies a failed revolution

Counter-revolution is not just a global counter-insurgency operation. Nor is it simply a restoration, a return to the old regime, or the re-establishment of a social order battered by conflict and revolt. It actively builds a new order to suit its own needs. It shapes mentalities, cultural behaviors, tastes, habits, and customs. But there’s more: counter-revolution uses the same presuppositions and tendencies as those on which the revolution is based; it occupies the terrain of its adversary and gives other answers to the same questions. It reinterprets the revolution in its own way.

As revolutionaries are crushed, dispersed, and isolated, the heads of the hydra we thought we’d cut off slowly grow back. Whether through the decolonial costumes worn by Putin or Xi Jinping, the “anti-establishment” rebellions of Trump, Milei, or Bolsonaro, or the “free world’s” war for “democracy,” elites everywhere try to harness aspirations of the uprisings to prevent their return. In Argentina, the “afuera!” (Out!) of Milei echoes the “que se vayan todos!” (Out with them all!) of the rebels at the turn of the century. The best way to crush the desire for freedom is to present oneself as a liberator.

In 2024, Donald Trump participates in rallies featuring slogans such as “be ungovernable” and “mass deportation now.” If fascists are our sworn enemies, it’s not just because their project is the opposite of ours. They’re our sworn enemies because they defend their project in revolutionary disguise, feeding off the impulses and aspirations of popular revolt while being the last resort of the centers. Putin, Meloni, Le Pen, like so many others, take advantage of the frustration and humiliation of the working class, undermined by the latest changes in capital, to consolidate their anti-establishment stance, so as to better defend the system. They claim to want to change everything so that nothing changes. Today, reactionaries are becoming more radical, while progressives flounder in moderation.

It’s no coincidence that fascists have so much hatred for the feminist and queer movements. Fascism sees them as an adversary capable of creating a desire for liberation which could potentially threaten the established order. Feminists in the South have convinced millions to join their movements, thanks to their radical claim to empowerment and a will to change everything by transgressing the rules of gender, class, geography, and age. The same is true of the queer movement, one of the few that continues to dare to dream. By shattering the binary logic at the basis of all power, they turn the imaginary into a weapon, and desire into a force. By putting the body at the heart of transformation, the queer revolution is one of the few movements to stand in the way of the fascists’ vision and embody possible futures. But, like so many other movements before them, they are being courted by the progressive factions of Empire, who are trying to defuse them and transform them into a harmless cultural accessory.

How can we believe that the bulldozing supremacisms of Trump, Modi, or Netanyahu could be beaten by a well-sourced argument, an IPCC report, the fact-checking of the New York Times or a vote at the UN? Every time it ventures onto this terrain, progressivism is a little more mocked, a little more discredited, and therefore counter-productive. The resignation of social democrats who claim it’s impossible to change anything, even after winning elections, prepares the path for subversion by fascist forces who only have to stoop to harvest the legitimate anger and lost souls of the uprisings. From Washington to Brasilia, so far, there has been nothing more than parodies of insurrection. The next time it could be much more serious.

The worldwide resurgence of xenophobic nationalism and the systematic attacks on women’s rights and sexual and gender dissidence are the result of a well-planned global offensive; that of a neo-fascist international. The increasingly tense and grimacing faces of power may differ in appearance, yet they all belong to the same beast. For beyond their apparent conflicts and enmities, these forces share a common goal: to maintain the power of the centers, no matter the cost. To achieve this, no massacre will be too costly. On the contrary, war has always been the method of choice to keep revolution at bay.

The age of exhaustion

Everywhere, we have fallen into a state of emergency. Of all the regimes whose demise we could wish for, it is one of the most tenacious and multiform. It is indelibly inscribed even in our ways of organization and methods of struggle.

There are the immediate emergencies that spur us to action, because it’s no longer possible to endure things as they are. Not having enough to eat, risking death or rape on every street corner, finding nowhere to shelter oneself and one’s children for the night, risking humiliation with every new administrative procedure, being beaten up at every identity check, fearing that there won’t be enough water to grow crops, that the earth will turn to sand …

The precarity of life plunges us into a grueling daily routine, filled with imperatives that we can’t even begin to resolve, and then another pressing situation arises. These emergencies, which unite us in our lived realities and monopolize our time and energy, are either faced alone or within our networks of relations, which are also exhausted. These daily pressures force us into unsustainable rhythms to keep struggles alive, to protect ourselves or avoid being crushed, demanding ever more energy simply to exist.

On the government side, as a cynical response to the emergencies just mentioned, there are those emergencies which, each in their own way, aim to remind us how helpless we are without the state’s protection: “economic crisis,” “natural” disasters, “foreign agents,” “external threats,” “migration crisis,” and so on. The “State of Emergency” is utilized by all regimes, from the most democratic to the most despotic, as a measure of exception to the state of “peace.”

The “emergency law” (Qanun al-Tawari’) governed the daily life of Syrians for over forty years before the revolution. Officially put in place to counter the military threat of Israel, it has always been used to repress any internal dissent. A few months after the start of the uprising, it was transformed into the “Counter-terrorism Law” but was still used to target any opposition. In Chile, the State of Emergency allowed President Piñera to (re)deploy the military against people in revolt. Over the last two decades, the use of the State of Emergency—as a legal justification for the absence of the rule of law—has spread everywhere, ostensibly in response to terrorist attacks as well as viruses, urban riots, and natural disasters.

A State of Emergency in every state

If politics is the continuation of war by other means, then governing and waging war are two sides of the same coin. The nation-state, with its particular way of structuring power, population management, and territorial control, has conquered almost the entire globe, through wars of colonization. However, the way in which power is exercised and populations controlled is not the same from one state to another, or from one region of the world to another.

The operation of the state apparatus is different for a former colonial power, well-established on the wealth it extorted from the rest of the world, than for a recently decolonized state under the influence of greater powers seeking to gain control over its resources. The degree of violence inflicted by the state on its own population is determined by the material means (colonial rent, oil rent, financial windfalls of various kinds) that the national elites have at their disposal to buy social peace before resorting to brute force.

Socialism, the welfare state, and social democracy, where they exist, have all been attempts to link the question of the state and that of popular sovereignty in a different way. In addition to its monopoly on “legitimate violence” and territorial defense, the State is also entrusted with the welfare of citizens, redistributing a part of the wealth, and providing services to the population. Each of these attempts, whether the outcome of revolutionary uprisings or reformist efforts, resulted in broadening popular support for the stability of the state.

But the time for social utopias is well and truly over. Hardly anyone is trying to sell us a rosy future. Dystopias have replaced utopias everywhere. There’s the conspiratorial threat of the “Great Replacement” espoused by white racists; the society of control under the subordination of authoritarian artificial intelligences; the imminent collapse of living conditions on Earth. When the traditional parties of the left attempt to re-enchant us with dusted-off political programs and new promises of change, it is now only due to the cyclical urgency of preventing the far right gaining power.

The “War on Terror” launched by the United States ushered in the twenty-first century. The pretext of the diffuse, omnipresent, and ever-imminent threat of terrorism has justified every war, every control measure, and every measure of exception at home and abroad. Mexico’s “war on drugs,” Russia’s “denazification of Ukraine,” Israel’s “eradication of Hamas,” Syria’s “annihilation of the Zionist-Wahabi conspiracy,” Turkey’s “crushing of Kurdish terrorism,” Mali’s “ending Tuareg secessionism,” Chile’s “dismantling of Mapuche terrorism,” and so many others … These are just some of the ways in which threats—some real, some fabricated—are used to divert societal tensions towards the fight against a common “enemy,” the ultimate guarantor of national unity. A domestic protest that is a little too strong will quickly slip into the rank of “enemy from within” if it is not satisfied with the negotiating framework it’s granted. The state is always portrayed as a “besieged castle,” under threat from hostile forces within or on its doorstep. It is legitimized by the very thing that threatens it.

The emergency defines our relationship to the world and ushers in differing degrees of authoritarian methods to deal with disasters. In turn summoned by political forces, trade unions and associations, then by governments that sometimes take them on board without responding to them, emergency has become the universal motif of politics. The only way to govern, or do activist work (where possible), is in the name of emergency. This imperative masks difference, conflict, and inequality: we are all concerned, in the same boat, equally victims, equally responsible, equally mobilizable.

Responding to a “social emergency,” calling for a “state of ecological emergency,” running from one cause to another, from a fight against an ecocide project to mobilization against a state reform, from a humanitarian crisis to an anti-fascist campaign. Each of these struggles, however important, sucks up all our available energy, and, lacking an overall strategy, we run around like headless chickens.

Finding the horizon

The militarization of cities, swift border closures, the explosion of police controls, electronic surveillance, and restrictions on movement, house arrests, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that authoritarian measures are perfectly feasible on a large scale and over a long period of time. All that is needed to reactivate them when necessary is a well-crafted argument or crisis.

For a number of years now, things that haven’t previously been in the media spotlight have been making headlines on 24-hour news channels: the sterilization of the oceans, the Australian or Amazon forests in the grip of flames, hurricanes and devastating floods. The mismatch between the positions and actions of governments and the proven gravity of the situation is clear to everyone. “Eco-anxiety” has become the disease of an epoch for those privileged enough not to have more pressing reasons to worry. It’s another contributing factor to the general paralysis. When we hear about wars, famines, humanitarian disasters, or mega-fires all day long, we’re left in a daze. It’s understandable, in order to survive, to ignore this information and carry on with life. As we are reminded of our own powerlessness, we are once again condemned to rely on an improbable leap of faith from the planet’s leaders, or at least try to pressure them.

The very real ecological emergency is undoubtedly a powerful mobilizing force when concrete targets are identified and action strategies drawn up. The call to respond to the climate emergency is partly used by people fighting to defend their territories, by political organizations and environmental movements, to gain attention and increase their forces, to legitimize more radical forms of mobilization, and create unprecedented popular convergences. But as these emergencies become more widely recognized and threaten the interests of the ruling classes, leverage may well change hands. Ecology, for example, has already permeated rightwing and liberal political discourse, and the moment is fast approaching when talk of ecological collapse will justify a new authoritarian turn, Chinese-Communist-Party style.

The youth of the centers are mesmerized by the prospect of their own tragic future, while those on the margins dream of plausible futures, with their back to the wall of an untenable present. The result is a repeatedly renewed disconnect between respective situations. In the time we have left, it is up to us to come up with a fresh response.

We must re-establish our own timeframe. We must make space to think together and apply the emergency brake. Whether we are living in a society already collapsing under the impact of war, natural disaster, or economic meltdown; or whether we belong to the heart of a Western fortress, stifled and haunted by the prospect of its forthcoming collapse, the only way forward is to elaborate a common plan, effective in each of our situations. And to ask:

What is the nature of this emergency? What leverage does it allow? What energy does it provide, what energy does it drain? What is to be gained in the race to define the root cause and nature of the emergency? What excessive means may it one day cause our opponents to use?

“Emergency,” as a mandate to act, is a maneuver to win people over, and make them submit to an agenda—andthere can be little doubt as to who will have the means to win in the end. As far as popular movements are concerned, urgency is always a prelude to scattering and exhaustion. We need to focus, measure our actions, and strike where striking can make a difference. Whatever the imperatives, whatever the pressure that can seem to paralyze us, the challenge is to act by focusing our energy and avoiding exhaustion. Organizing in the face of a counterrevolutionary offensive on this scale means rediscovering a horizon and building for the long term: establishing connections and marshaling strength to avoid defeat in the insurrectionary explosions to come.

Turning exile into a position of attack

/ Deadly paths / Arrival in the host country / Increasing circulations /

Every attempt at revolution, every insurrection, leaves in its wake a new generation of exiled revolutionaries. In Cairo, Baghdad, Santiago, and elsewhere, uprisings have left people unable to return to their former lives, not only because of the existential upheaval experienced, but also because of the cost of struggle. Losing an uprising is never without consequences. In addition to defeat, rebels pay the price through trauma, prison, mutilation, or death. Others experience the heartbreak of having to abandon their land and their loved ones. Our decade of uprisings has thrown a whole generation of Syrians, Sudanese, Iranians, Haitians, and Hong Kongers into exile, joining the Kurds, Palestinians, and Tamils of previous generations.

Exile is not just the result of political repression. An exile is also a person forced to abandon their homeland in order to survive, because home has become too dangerous, life has become unbearably expensive, and the land less nourishing. Wanting a future for one’s children, needing to live one’s convictions or one’s sexuality elsewhere, are all causes of exile. For people on the margins, especially in the Global South, countless threats make staying at home too great a risk. Yet, the “migration crisis” has only just begun. Global warming will lead to massive displacement in the decades to come, as resources become increasingly scarce and large parts of the globe become uninhabitable. Paradoxically, the proliferation of borders and classifications on arrival only reinforce the desire to leave, rather than discouraging it.

Faced with domination, exploitation and humiliation, we have three options: survive, flee, or revolt. Whether in Senegal, Haiti, or Lebanon, popular anger is multiplying at the same rate as departures. The clear-cut distinctions between “economic” migrants, “political” exiles, and soon-to-be “climate” refugees make sense only to governments.

Revolt and exile are different responses to problems that have the same root: the exponential deterioration of living conditions and the proliferation of repressive regimes. Since the beginning of this century, people all over the world have been rising against those responsible for their material and emotional misery. Global and local elites, whether authoritarian or liberal, are obsessed with maintaining their power and wealth, always obtained through the endless exploitation of resources and the bodies of those living on the margins. Is it any wonder then that these populations try to reach the centers—to reclaim what has been plundered?

Deadly paths

When we decide, or are forced, to leave our homelands, a new struggle begins. The roads of exile become more hostile by the day. The sea cemeteries of the Mediterranean or the English Channel, the death roads linking Latin America to the United States, the harsh desert of the Sahara that many African migrants cross only to risk enslavement in Libya. Exile is deadly, and like uprisings, it constitutes an act of refusal. You revolt or you leave, and sometimes you revolt and then you leave because you can’t or won’t put up with what you are put through. We flee because, despite the risks, sometimes flight is the safest option.

Governments continue to do everything they can to prevent “undesirable” migration: reinforcing security and military powers; increasing restrictions on freedom of movement, building walls and impenetrable borders, criminalizing solidarity with people on the move. Fortress Europe has established a specialized agency, Frontex, to keep those of us who have taken to the sea out of Schengen waters. States are quick to cooperate on these issues. Through lucrative agreements, Europe and the United States are trying to outsource border controls to Turkey, African countries, or Mexico so governments there may be seen to be “turning off the tap” of migration.

100 million Euros promised to Tunisia, in a state of economic collapse, by the European Union to “prevent illegal migration.” First results: Black people violently expelled from Tunisian territory to wander and die in a no-man’s land in the middle of the desert. President Kais Saied has even borrowed the “Great Replacement” theory from the European far right. This conspiracy theory postulates that white, “native” European civilization is being demographically and culturally replaced by the massive arrival of non-white migrants, particularly Muslims. Saied’s version turns this fable against Black migrants, who are accused of changing the demographic and cultural make-up of Tunisia. Through constant repetition, this discourse has become entrenched in a society with its own history of racism. We’ve seen mobs attacking Black people and demanding their expulsion.

In Sudan, the European Union has directly financed General Hemedti’s Janjaweed Rapid Support Forces to “curb immigration.” This paramilitary force, which was involved in the repression of the revolution and then went to war against the Sudanese Armed Forces, had previously carried out ethnic cleansing operations in Darfur thanks to this funding. Since 2018, repression and the war have displaced more than 10 million people inside and outside the country.

To maintain a semblance of alignment with their humanist principles, European democracies externalize, meaning make invisible, some of the violence they are prepared to wreak against us. Violence is exercised internally and without restraint in urban ghettos on the fringes of metropolises. It is financed externally in the form of bloody repression abroad. The British government attempted to introduce a policy of deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda, in order to “deter unauthorized migration” by creating a “hostile environment” on British soil. Europe could not have been “enlightened” without being colonial.

Faced with this institutionalized xenophobic offensive, we must scale up our actions at borders to offer safe passage. In Europe, an autonomous maritime coordination system has been set up to organize solidarity in the Mediterranean: rescue boats at sea, telephone helplines, negotiations with the authorities, and public mobilization … Where such networks exist, we need to increase their capacity. Where they do not, we need to establish them. One of our main challenges is to ensure that comrades no longer die on the road to exile by providing efficient logistical support along major routes. We pay tribute to all those who have died on the road, to escape persecution, or simply in search for a dignified life.

But solidarity with those in exile is not enough. Freedom of movement is not limited to safe-passage or “legalizing” migration. Freedom of movement is meaningless if it does not imply the possibility of staying at home or returning. Hence the need to fight for a dignified life everywhere, instead of letting certain states claim to embody the good life while destroying the conditions that make it possible elsewhere.

Arrival in the host country

The ordeal does not stop at the end of the road. As soon as we arrive in the “host country,” we are confronted with the need to become “legal.” A series of bureaucratic procedures are responsible for determining whether a person had enough reason to leave their country of origin, enough money, or a certain level of education or “talent,” to be allowed to stay on the territory. Then begins a long process of classification and interrogation, an administrative limbo suffused with daily humiliation. Some eventually pass the test, others are rejected and deported as “illegals.” The administrative battle is compounded by the material question: again, a struggle for decent living conditions, the need to find a roof over your head and a source of income, while learning a new language, new cultural norms, and new ways of doing things.

Those fleeing political persecution will not necessarily find security in exile. If they are not criminalized again for political activities, like Kurdish or Uyghur activists in Turkey, they may be threatened abroad, or even murdered, as was Rouhollah Zam, an Iranian activist living in exile in France, who was kidnapped in Iraq and then executed in Iran. The Chinese authorities have even set up clandestine police stations in Europe and the United States to exert their control over Chinese people abroad. In Britain, anti-Chinese Communist Party activism on campuses is muzzled by the threat of reduced investment in universities run like businesses.

In addition to government and police repression, many of us face an increasingly hostile local population in our places of exile. Elections everywhere are held against a backdrop of xenophobic media coverage, where racism and Islamophobia feature with increasing prominence. “Moderate” forces are beginning to speak the same language of reactionary politics in the hope of not losing ground. Depicting foreigners as a threat, as one of the main reasons for the deterioration in living conditions, is designed to channel citizen anger and anguish. Designating scapegoats is a very convenient strategy for those in power. It justifies growing inequalities, boosting the profits of the richest while absolving them of responsibility for the impoverishment of everyone else. In a sign of the times, in mid-summer 2024, coordinated white racist riots rocked towns and cities across England. Rioters targeted non-white people, Muslim places of worship, and hotels housing asylum-seekers when a news story was successfully exploited by far-right networks. Only poor immigrants are called “aliens.”

Xenophobia can also be more subtle. Racial discrimination is not just a flaw in state institutions, it affects everyone. Though we may receive compassion or sympathy in exile, we are generally denied a political role, as we were in the country we have had to leave. There is no shortage of curious people in the West who find our culture, our music, our food, our language “delicious” and “utterly fascinating,” but who couldn’t care less about our opinions on the way the world works. An exile is a humanitarian and depoliticized figure who arouses the charity and good conscience of leftwing citizens, and a folkloric object on which to project fantasies of elsewhere. “Multiculturalism,” lauded in the age of globalization, is the analgesic for the destruction of cultures and worlds.

Anti-racist circles and movements of solidarity with exiles are not exempt from these phenomena. Our analyses and involvement in movements in our countries of origin arouse little interest. For the most part we remain outsiders. The persistent ignorance of certain “comrades” we meet in exile, of the situations of struggle outside their national and psychic borders, is a form of paternalism that reduces us to the role of victims: the “economic crisis” in Sri Lanka, the “civil war” in Syria or Sudan, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. This denial of our subjectivity and agency, combined with difficult material conditions, is a major obstacle to genuine political friendships. It creates a heap of missed opportunities that prolongs the ordeal of revolutionaries in exile and deprives local communities of the lessons, experience, and know-how that could only strengthen local militant activism.

In Greece, despite the economic crisis, the outpouring of solidarity with refugees led to a general mobilization of anarchists and revolutionaries. Squats, based on the principles of mutual aid, were opened in the cities to provide safe living spaces. They offered better living conditions and greater autonomy than government camps. Collective kitchens were established, and practical support given to help meet basic needs (clothing, language courses, and access to job opportunities) as well as access to physical, mental, and reproductive health care. Exiles and their supporters worked together to ensure self-defense against attacks by fascists and the state. Within a few years though, exhaustion set in, with a lack of horizon and sometimes common goals, and due to the gentrification policies of some neighborhoods, the movement lost its momentum.

Our primary task is to create and connect places of refuge to ensure the humanitarian minimum. We also need to consolidate lasting structures to generate new energy, heal trauma, reduce loneliness, and ensure subsistence. To do all this, we first need to meet each other.

Increasing circulations

Internationalism, like revolutionary theory, has always been closely linked to exile and diasporas. Throughout history, many revolutionaries have, at one time or another in their life, had to abandon their country of origin. They have been deported; they have had to migrate; they have been forced into exile; they have wanted to join a guerrilla movement. They have encountered new realities, familiarized themselves with different contexts, and shared analyses of the events that shook the countries they left behind. Far from being a mere coincidence, the transnational mobility of these figures was fundamental to nourishing practice and disseminating thought.

Internationalism is a journey, not only of people, but also of ideas and practices. Thinking about exile is a response to the challenge of constructing common perceptions despite a diversity of local contexts and the specific difficulties inherent to different situations. Exile can be experienced as an extension of revolt, a bridge linking it to the rest of the world. This could prove a means of compensating for the profound lack of understanding that many of today’s revolts have faced, due to the lack of relations between revolutionaries from different parts of the world.

Despite the daily struggle for regularization and dignified living conditions, despite the priority we logically give to solidarity with the struggle in our home countries, we need to link up with local and diasporic liberation forces wherever we arrive. In Berlin, a whole generation of exiles and their allies are organizing joint demonstrations for the liberation of Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, Iran, and Sudan. It is from this united front between foreigners that exiled people feel powerful, no longer isolated, each in his or her own ‘minority’ and ‘marginal’ struggle.

Participating in (or initiating) local mobilizations as exiles, and forging alliances with the forces at work, could well prove to be the best way to take up the offensive with new levers, more allies, and new horizons. The links between revolutionaries from different geographies, which are easier to forge in exile, help to increase material and political support for our comrades and loved ones still on the front lines or under the bombs.

Building a force capable of coordinating and supporting revolutionary efforts wherever they arise will involve a struggle to bring together a generation of defeated and exiled people scattered across the globe. It must respond to defeat, exhaustion, and dispossession, materially and emotionally. But it must also offer a more powerful remedy: the preparation of a response.

Internationalism from below

/ The problem of ‘solidarity’ / Mutual aid / Extending the minga worldwide / Down with realpolitik, for a revolutionary tenderness /

Although everything has been done to belittle the power of people in revolt, its impact has proved contagious. No amount of attempting to disrupt communication between different struggles has succeeded, no amount of trying to blur their meaning. Hope, courage, and insurrection have crossed bodies, territories, and all borders. The death of a Tunisian street vendor in December 2010 triggered one of the biggest revolutionary waves in history. When Lebanese people chanted Kilon yani Kilon (Every single one of them means every single one of them) ⁱⁱ , this was a belated reference to an Argentinian slogan at the start of the century—Que Se Vayan Todos(Out with Them All) ⁱⁱⁱ—and also to Tunisians’ chanting Dégage (Out of Here).^iv Feminists the world over chanted Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom).^v

Protesters in Brussels and Lausanne took to the streets after the murder of Nahel by French police. Colombian front lines borrowed their shields and their chants from the front lines of Chile. By challenging the mirage of nation-states, twenty-first century rebels realized they were fighting a common enemy. Same cops ahead, same banks behind, same bastards on top.

Feeling is not enough. It does not make for a front. Rebellious Egyptians proved unable to send cordons of “ultras” to support the uprising in Libya. Communalists the world over failed to give support to local councils in Syria. The Zapatistas lacked the means to send experienced cadres to front lines in Chile and Colombia. Anonymous hackers alone have been plugging the gaps, attacking digital strongholds around the world in support of rebels.

The absence of support from revolutionary forces led Syrian rebels to accept arms and funding from Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The Palestinian resistance is forced to take money from Iran and Qatar. The Kurds of the PYD are dependent on the Syrian regime and have sought help both from its Russian ally and the United States in order to survive. Revolts in West Africa are relying on support from Russia and China to oust France. Popular resistance in Ukraine has had to place its survival in the hands of the West.

Dependence on superpowers is a question of survival for many revolutionaries, so how can we condemn them? It’s unreasonable to expect people to continue living under repression, capitulate, or wait passively as the bombs fall. A lack of international support condemns revolutionaries to isolation or the hijacking of popular demands by foreign powers more concerned with their own interests than those they claim to help. Syrian revolutionaries, abandoned by the whole world, asked: “Governments have betrayed us. Where are the peoples?”

The problem of ‘solidarity’

In Iraq, after the US invasion had destroyed local seed banks, international organizations flooded the country with genetically modified seeds distributed to farmers free of charge. In order to use them, farmers had to purchase fertilizers and chemical pesticides from foreign companies, which meant that many fell into debt and were forced to abandon their land. This is how humanitarian aid prolonged colonial domination and led one of the cradles of agriculture to ruin.

Over the last few decades, “international aid” has come to replace internationalism, deemed too partisan and so sacrificed on the altar of “development.” This approach has long been criticized for the hierarchical dependence it creates in Southern countries on Northern NGOs. Although humanitarian aid may save lives, it rarely tackles root causes. Band-aids don’t stop the bleeding. Even where international aid terms itself “solidarity” and attempts to provide concrete solutions, the effects are often perverse.

In Palestine, the mass arrival of NGOs, foundations, and other international organizations followed the Oslo Agreement. Popular self-organization that had grown out of the intifadas were diluted in “civil society,” where resistance efforts were formalized, encouraged to become “projects” with logos, statements of intent, and budgets. By making funding conditional on “apolitical” actions, grassroots initiatives are disfigured and popular resistance is weakened. In any case, the Israeli occupying authorities exercise absolute control over any form of civil grouping in the West Bank and Jerusalem. So it’s hardly surprising that Hamas, a reactionary organization, concentrates all hopes for national liberation. These essentially top-down solidarities make aid conditional on rules and times that are disconnected from territorial struggles, as are the allegiances, codes, language, and bureaucracy they require.

To gain exterior support, a cause must be made acceptable, even attractive. Dependence on external funders subordinates a cause to the support it’s likely to receive. Such a cause is often molded to obtain the greatest possible return and guarantee competitiveness on the solidarity market. Solidarity of this kind alters the spirit of a struggle and submits margins to centers, be they Western, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, or in the Gulf. Syrian revolutionary brigades had to either cut off their beards to obtain Western support, or grow them to get money from Qatar or Saudi Arabia.

Even when “international solidarity” organizations and collectives leave a great deal of autonomy to those in struggle and trust people on the ground, they often generate one-way relationships. In order to compensate for structural inequalities and relationships of domination which they produce, common political and ethical lines, as well as strategic practice, need to be defined by the people concerned—those on the receiving end of solidarity and those handing it out. The aim is to create conditions conducive to mutual support, based on equal relationships that acknowledge reciprocity between struggles and territories.

Mutual aid

Mutual support begins with recognizing our need to work together. This is bound to be a gradual process. Making relationships truly reciprocal takes time. So does building bonds of trust. Both involve knowing how to be there for each other. Both demand erasing the distinction between word and deed. Rather than doing good deeds, the idea is taking other people’s struggle into account as being a part of our own, and vice versa. In a world where competition reigns supreme, even between struggles, this is the reversal of a paradigm.

Mutual aid has no center because it operates in multiple directions, and acknowledges power relations. When the first workers’ solidarity funds in the nineteenth century sent money to support a strike, they insisted that these were loans rather than donations. The idea was not to expect interest or even actual repayment. It rather asserted that help was not given out of kindness or charity, but was a gesture that called forth others in return, at other times, or in other forms. It’s clear that it’s easier to send financial support from the Global North to the South than vice versa. But this is not the only form that mutual aid can take.

The first form of mutual aid is material. It takes us back to the minga (coming together for the common good). In Abya Yala (a name that Indigenous ethnic communities in North and South America to refer to the landmasses generally known as the Americas/America), this principle is embodied in different ways by pooling the tasks, resources, and goods needed for collective work: helping to move a house, cultivating a field, constructing a building. It’s when people, neighbors, and communities work together, but also take advantage of the moment to enjoy the conviviality of being together and building strong communal bonds. The uprisings and their aftermath have made visible the need for material aid, from medicines to seeds, involving a long chain of people and places. To do this, allies are needed who can open paths and cross borders. Solidarity convoys to collectives in Greece after 2008 and popular mutual aid initiatives to Ukraine since 2022 both constitute examples to be generalized, built on, and shared. There’s considerable scope for progress in this area.

Such schemes need money. How can financial support, both popular and effective, be achieved? Or to put it another way: is it possible to finance a revolution without the help of the powerful? Many diasporas, whether Kurdish, Palestinian, or Burmese, whether very recently or a long time ago, have helped struggles in their native countries survive. The Burmese resistance, for instance, popularized “revolutionary crowd-funding,” raising hundreds of millions of dollars to finance resistance groups. Aggregating micro-contributions on a massive scale and setting up transnational mutual funds, can both limit our dependence on the goodwill of patrons, governments and NGOs.

Beyond the directly material question, mutual aid can take the form of amplifying the voices of individuals and groups grappling with the reality of the revolutionary terrain. The task of an international aid network is to help them break through the media net and the background noise of the reactionary communication channels. No revolution should ever again feel orphaned or betrayed by global indifference. This presupposes being able to communicate with people on the ground at crucial moments. It means obtaining information and translating it to suit other contexts. It involves coordinating support actions and establishing long-term communication channels to share our analyses.

It’s vitally important to create a common history, weaving together all our accumulated experiences. This implies making the history of previous struggles and experiences known. Running an anti-fascist campaign, writing a feminist constitution, developing farming techniques, defeating an army of trolls, defending ourselves against the police, setting up funding networks, and answering daily needs within a liberated area are skills and knowledge that can be shared. Conservative and counter-revolutionary forces are doing everything they can to portray our uprisings as disasters, our rebels as terrorists, and our achievements as failures. The battle of narratives and images is more important than ever, both in the immediacy of the struggle and to nourish a memory of the future, as Chilean comrades say.

Mutual support may be embodied in action. It can mean blockading an arms factory to reduce bombings elsewhere, or disrupting a multinational corporation in one place to undermine extraction across the globe. It can also mean influencing what is known as “public opinion” where people live, work, and spend their leisure time in order to build support for those on front lines. Mutual aid is the driving force behind internationalism. By acquiring an international profile, local struggles develop a capacity for global action and create global alliances against borderless networks of power and money. We will not lack common enemies.

Extending the minga worldwide

People will ask “But there are already so many things to fight for and against here … why add international struggles to the list? We need to avoid dispersion and exhaustion.” The priority and urgency of local situations is always more pressing. It might even seem illusory to claim to be changing the situation elsewhere when we are struggling to do so where we are. Internationalism sometimes seems like a romantic dream, beautiful but basically naïve, like a relic from the past, a dusty box full of memories and postcards: Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Spain …

But building internationalism has never been a luxury, it’s a survival strategy. Those who have made it a pillar of their struggle (the Zapatistas, Kurds, Palestinians) are almost the only revolutionary movements to have survived long-term to the present day, despite relentless attacks from all sides. For these movements, internationalism has compensated for the imbalance of power between the grassroots and the military forces they face, has shifted the terrain of hostilities to the diplomatic level, and created worldwide solidarity networks. In their time, the historic victories against colonialism in Ireland, Vietnam, and Algeria were won by insurgents on their own soil, but also through winning the hearts of the people in the center of empires, until the people of those countries themselves demanded an end to war and occupation. Fighting from the belly of the beast is always necessary to broaden the front and arena of confrontation and support those on the ground. But we need to listen to their demands, rather than centering ourselves and giving precedence to our own political positions or applying our own analytical framework to the situation.

While we draw on historical precedent, we’re not nostalgic for some “golden age” of internationalism. In the twentieth century, internationalism was largely aligned with the interests of nation-states, and it fractured as a result. Instead of combating nationalism, it sometimes reinforced it. Attachment to land and culture as terrains of struggle has its place, but we should be wary of its instrumentalization by state apparatuses that serve national ruling classes. Internationalism begins at home, in our everyday territories. Places where populations are diverse, mixed, heterogeneous and, strictly speaking, inter-national are fertile ground for it. These include the world’s metropolises, border areas, and the major agricultural production zones that rely on immigrant labor. Internationalism means establishing multiple links between struggling peripheries, between different corners of the world, to reduce the attractiveness of regional and global centers of power.

Our territories are interwoven with transnational production logics. The power of a local political proposal today lies in its ability to see itself as part of a global network of resistance and uprisings. Without this, it runs the risk of being reduced to an “alternative” experiment, whether that is cultural, economic, or social, ignoring the links that tie it to the rest of the world. Conversely, unless firmly established at local level, internationalism can be no more than a nostalgic song, or a nice meeting place for a cosmopolitan activist elite. The challenge we face is to extend the minga worldwide, between territories of struggle, between popular powers. This is what we mean by internationalism from below.

Looking at what’s happening elsewhere is a breath of fresh air, giving us strength and courage when “home” becomes dark and unbearable. Somewhere on Earth, there are always people who are organizing, who don’t give up. Since 2011, while people have shown an awareness of other people’s struggles and borrowed from them, intensifying exchanges, there is still no sign of a transnational revolutionary force capable of connecting resistance movements and revolutions without taking control of demands and aspirations. There is no time to lose in building such a force if we want to make a decisive impact.

Down with realpolitik, for a revolutionary tenderness

It won’t always be easy to find common lines of defense and attack, even if we share the same desires and hopes. There are a multitude of obstacles ahead. We don’t speak the same language; we live far apart; understanding local complexities takes time. Added to these practical difficulties is the posturing of those who actively oppose our struggles out of ‘pragmatism’ or out of counter-revolutionary nonsense. Such are overarching, geopolitical approaches, reminiscent of a bad remake of the Cold War, minus the socialism. From this perspective, in the final analysis, world events are only ever determined by a clash of blocs. States are the only agents capable of affecting change. Anything that goes beyond the realm of realpolitik, and is therefore potentially revolutionary, is doomed to failure.

This binary logic has led a section of the “anti-imperialist” left to support, implicitly or explicitly, the Iranian, Russian, Chinese, and Syrian regimes as “bulwarks” against imperialism, Zionism, colonialism, and western-capitalist hegemony. According to this point of view, the Syrian and Iranian revolutions are seen as “liberal” or “pro-Western” and easily “manipulated.” They were dismissed as plots hatched by foreign countries, obviously Western, to compromise the “national sovereignty” of the regimes in place. In this narrative, the people, their forms of organization, their autonomous actions, the plurality of their voices, their internal social or class struggles—like the massacres committed against them by these regimes and their allies—count for nothing.

These self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” can seem so far out of step with real movements that when uprisings occur, they rush to apply their abstract interpretations, and deprive those most affected of their ability to make themselves heard. In their eyes, the popular resistance in Ukraine, the feminists in Iran, and the revolutionaries in Syria are either “agents of imperialism” or incapable of understanding their own situations. From their supposedly “critical distance” these ideologues, usually based in the West, believe they know better than people on the ground what needs to be done. When those in revolt put forward analyses and demands that don’t fit with their dogma, resistance fighters in Ukraine are slandered as “Nazis,” the rebels in Syria are called “jihadists,”,the feminists in Iran “traitors.” This is what these “anti-imperialists” are doing, acting as proxies for the murderous regimes they support and defend.

Seeing Western countries as the only imperialist powers, and the United States as the source of all evil, a characteristic bias of these “campist” positions, leads them to relativize the crimes of the Syrian, Russian, Chinese, or Iranian regimes. The maintenance of these regimes, or even their rise to prominence, would be opportune, according to this logic, to balance the world order and counter Western hegemony. Imperial powers such as China and Russia, which rhetorically support the cause of Palestine, are seen as allies, or the lesser evil vis-à-vis the hypocrisy of Western countries, all aligned behind the Israeli occupation. But more “opportune” or “lesser evil” for whom? Why should we tolerate the genocide of Uyghurs in China in order to put an end to the genocide in Gaza? Why should we denounce the Israeli occupation of Palestine on one hand, and turn a blind eye to the counter-insurgency war in Chechnya, Russia’s invasion of Georgia or Ukraine, and vice versa?

In 2019, Iraqi rebels, who have some experience of imperialism, made clear in mass demonstrations that they wanted “neither the USA nor Iran” in their country. There are subtle categories and more or less complex theoretical labels to describe the different types of imperialism that exist today; but “sub-imperialism” is the same old shit we’ve always known.

“Campist” positions only create barriers and divisions between struggles. They prevent necessary alliances between people on the margins. Instead of emphasizing what unites us, these “pragmatists” tell us that, to be effective, we should consider that the enemies of our enemies are our friends. Solidarity is therefore based less on what is happening on the ground than on the positions taken by the United States. If the United States opportunistically supports a cause, such as the rebellion in Hong Kong, then the people of Hong Kong are undeserving of support, no matter how much China wants to extend its authoritarian grip there. This is a “Kissinger” and not a “Che Guevara” approach. It is ethically deplorable and strategically counter-productive, we need a revolutionary tenderness capable of listening; wanting to understand; navigating contradictions in order to stand alongside those in struggle. We are placing our bets on those who want to change the rules of the game, rather than on those who want to win the game as it is.

Contrary to what an authoritarian and statist left would have us believe, linking struggles increases our power. Building collective strength is exactly what the feminist movements in the southern part of Abya Yala managed to achieve in recent years. By taking into account multiple forms of violence—against sexual dissidents, Afro-descendants, women, Indigenous people, migrants, children, the elderly, whether at work, in the street, at home, or by the police—and including all those impacted in the feminist general strikes, rather than seeing them as rivals, they succeeded in weaving together a huge popular movement. United but not uniform. Massive but radical.

Those who are too impatient, or have no horizon of their own, prefer to take refuge in the shadow of the powerful rather than share the fate of those who run the risk of being defeated. We must fight against our own weakness, and in particular against the belief that we can do nothing without participating in the games played by the powerful. Admittedly, we feel that we are few and that we are lacking in resources. But recognizing this and using it as a starting point to build our strength is certainly more realistic than taking shortcuts, clinging to second best, and thus reproducing the conditions of our powerlessness.

Only the people can save the people. We need to give substance to this slogan by starting to build, in the four corners of the globe, a transnational force capable of effectively countering the cold monsters that are devouring our present and future. Building a real force for intervention and mutual aid will take time and require resources that we need to patiently prepare, but it’s the only way forward. No real victory is possible in just one part of the world. Empire has established itself everywhere, so it’s only by confronting it everywhere, simultaneously, that we may one day share in its downfall.

The Fall of Empire

/ What we mean by The West / Empire will outlive the West / “Each generation must, in relative obscurity, face up to its mission: fulfill it or betray it” / Stopping this world /

Across the planet, despite the walls and fences placed in their way, despite the many strategies of assimilation and annihilation, people are reclaiming territories, resources, cultures, and heritages. They’re fighting for everything they’ve been robbed of by centuries of colonial plunder and imperial pretensions. Such is the case of the Palestinian resistance, which has held out against Israeli colonization and Western imperialism for over seventy years; or the Kurdish movement, which has been fighting for over a century against four nation states that deny its right to autonomy. In Abya Yala, Indigenous and Afro-descendant revolts have not ceased since 1492 and continue to inspire the continents’ struggles. From Wounded Knee to Oka, from Standing Rock to the uprising that followed the death of George Floyd, people are rising against a system of domination based on white supremacy and the exploitation of our bodies and territories. Time and again, revolts against racist police crime flare in Europe, while Kanaky continues is anti-colonial struggle against France, and in West Africa French postcolonial authority continues to be dismantled.

But international waters are murky and disputed and are difficult for insurgents to navigate. Until now, the centers have kept a firm grip on the horizon, confining each struggle, each uprising, to its particular context. Dominant figures in the centers cannot believe that anyone would want anything other than to join the center. The center is the best of all possible worlds. The rest of us can only run to catch up, collapse, get up again, and hope one day to make it. The only world we have in common is the world as defined by the victors of “globalization.” But when revolutionary irruption does occur, it gives rise to a different “world in common” that emerges from the ruins, cracks, and margins. This is the common world we need to name, born of revolt and free of the specifics of its various contexts.

What we mean by The West

The incredible claim of the West to define a ‘universal’ horizon for humanity has caused and justified millions of deaths, genocides, epistemicides, not to mention the enslavement and displacement of millions of people. What a macabre, and effective, intellectual swindle! The founding myth of the “free subject” forged and propagated by the “Enlightenment” was born in the context of a revolutionary struggle against tyranny. It has been transformed into an alibi for limitless expropriation under a new economic order, in lieu of the good word of God. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed with great fanfare the same year that the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) sent hundreds of thousands into exile.

Liberal ‘universalism’ is the apolitical rival of internationalism. It preaches that human rights are inalienable, and denies them to most. It teaches that states belong to an ‘international community’ where good relations between nations are harmonized. Yet, this is no more than a playground where hierarchies are masked and vassalages disguised. Words are bandied about, action and good resolutions are mimed, as if to conceal what everyone knows deep down: that the survival of the fittest still governs the human world.

The ‘international community’ is a private club of nation-states, in which hegemons agree on criteria for membership, while justifying perpetual dominion over those who don’t fit the bill. The latter are not exactly ‘excluded’: they are afforded a sort of partial membership. Some are more equal than others. And it’s the same with these entities’ populations: some are deemed human, some are human shields, some are human animals, and some just collateral damage. The United States invaded Afghanistan and also Iraq. It bombed many parts of the Middle East, at a cost of more than a million lives, in the name of “protecting democracy” and the “universal ideal of human rights.” Even as we write these lines, an Israeli colonial state is knowingly committing genocide in Palestine with the blessing of the West, and occupation troops sometimes fly the LGBTQI flag.

Yet Empire’s cynical use of the garb of ‘human rights’ to establish itself as a universal judge of peace has not prevented ‘human rights’ also being claimed as a discourse of resistance and a basis of support for popular struggles throughout the world. There is therefore a contradictory dual use of international law; by the centers and by the margins. Indigenous or colonized peoples regularly use the ‘right to self-determination’ as leverage in their struggle against their national governments and occupying forces. Human rights and their symbolic weight on the international stage regularly serve as a reference point for resistance to oppression on the ground, as a denunciation of State terrorism. But the lightning rod of international law offers little protection if it does not serve the interests of dominant powers. They will always prefer to turn a blind eye when the price is not worth it. So it was with the red lines of the ‘free world’ on the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime against its own population. The people of Ghouta were expendable.

NATO’s “humanitarian” or “responsibility to protect” intervention, that took place in Libya during the 2011 uprising, is one of the key events in this latest revolutionary sequence that nobody is talking about anymore. The end of a local order through the intervention of advocates of a “global order” interrupted the revolutionary process and created new dependencies. The Anglo-French intervention, while likely to have prevented a bloody Syrian-style scenario, has enabled the establishment of a semblance of governments that are not born of revolutionary spaces, yet possess a right to sign agreements on behalf of people who asked for nothing of the kind. The Libyan revolution has thus been lost in internal power struggles between factions, none of which seem capable of embodying the will of the people. But the “essentials” have been safeguarded: the coastguards are paid by the European Union to stem the tide of migrants. From Syria to Ukraine, the spontaneous reaction of some revolutionaries and their supporters has been to regret the non-intervention of the “international community.” Yet, when intervention did occur, it was simply another way of extinguishing or neutralizing the revolutionary “threat”.

In Sudan, resistance committees displayed a healthy mistrust towards any foreign intervention in the revolutionary process. This did not prevent the military and militias from winning out. Foreign interference found another path, siding with the competing factions of the former regime, some supported by the United Arab Emirates, others by Egypt, drowning the popular revolution in a military war. The consequence has been massive displacement and appalling famine. The Sudanese revolution’s tenacious non-alignment has earned it a number of determined enemies within and beyond its borders. Enemies prepared to “burn down the country” rather than risk revolutionary success.

No power whatsoever has ever really come to the aid of insurgent people. A few years ago, at an evening in support of the Syrian revolution somewhere in France, a member of the public asked “but what can we do to help?” One of the activists present, a survivor of the siege of Homs, replied: “send us anti-tank missiles!” Apart from the fact that the audience were not in a position to respond to such a request, it seemed to place any solidarity action with Syrian revolutionaries in the shadow of States. Was there no other way to help the revolution other than by calling on Western governments to intervene militarily against the regime, or deliver heavy weapons?

For us, this is not a moral question, even if for many dissidents in the centers it would be inconceivable to demonstrate to demand military intervention by NATO. Having access to weapons is a matter of survival for many insurgents, which even the most pacifist among us cannot fail to recognize. That comrades on the front lines of the Ukrainian, Libyan, or Palestinian resistance have called for military or tactical intervention by third powers to counter the ferocious repression unleashed against them is understandable. There’s a whole debate to be had within revolutionary movements on the question of military intervention, the forms it can take, and its impact on the outcome of events; from no-fly zones to boots on the ground; from opening up new fronts to technical assistance and the provision of military equipment. We cannot move forward without a serious assessment of the balance of power on the ground. Nor may we revert to impotent purism in the hope of avoiding contradictions. But to be dependent on the military capabilities of certain states or armed factions and see this as the only practical way of contributing to the struggle is a sign of our resignation; an abandonment of the very possibility of revolution.

Empire will outlive the West

The world we live in is full of differences, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that are distinct but compatible, forming an overall picture of where we live. Differences are not just about distance. They are not the result of backwardness: they cannot be overcome by “progress.” In an era of monolithic beliefs, differences are denied, or crushed, to suit a global system for managing resources, exchanges, and identities. A skillful interweaving of distinct but complementary systems of domination has turned us into subjects of an Empire that is constantly being modulated and extended. Changes in alliances, in the balance of power, and of capital cities are on the surface. Although there were pre-capitalist empires which predated the nation-state and were non-Western, the expansion of capitalism unified Empire into a single whole. Thus, Empire survived the official end of European colonial empires, became secularized, and succeeded in spreading a belief that no alternative is possible.

Empire is not merely the name of the world system in which we live, with its international institutions, global markets, unified language, and ideological framework, from which no corner of the world is excluded. It’s also a particular way of perceiving the world as a vast board game where different allied or rival powers compete for wealth and spheres of influence. Empire is where States negotiate the most profitable division of labor and the ‘rules of engagement’ that allow each player to hold its own in the game of mass murder in which they are engaged. Beyond the capitalist system, Empire refers to all the formal and informal institutions, codes, customs, and rules that govern the centers’ predation on the rest of the world. From Mexico City to Dubai, from Tokyo to Cape Town, from Beijing to Frankfurt, people in the centers of power talk, eat, dress, make agreements, and con each other in much the same way. Empire always finds its local relays. It adapts to all cultures, all religions, all styles of exercising power. It remains indifferent to intention, culture, and behavior, as long as its spokespeople continue to play the game.

The recent strengthening of bloc logic is less a struggle between different kinds of imperialism, and rather a struggle for imperial hegemony within the same world-system. While the West may appear to be making a comeback these days, with its show of unity to cover up genocide in the name of “Israel’s right to defend itself,” this comeback does little to conceal a slow decline amply illustrated in the proletarianization of societies, galloping inflation, the rise of fascism, calamitous military interventions, the disorderly withdrawal of occupying troops, and the steady loss of commercial and diplomatic influence. On a different note, the apparent consensus in support of the Ukrainian resistance suggests a certain feverishness, with military aid provided in dribs and drabs that has never been equal to Russian aggression. The “decline of the West” would be good news if it meant the decline of Empire. But it’s only its face that is changing. The conquering smiles on the faces of the BRICs leaders, who everywhere flaunt their opportunistic alliance, makes clear that they are ready to take their place at the same game. As long as Empire exists, the struggle against it continues, always renewing its form and statements, which it will again try to swallow to get back on its feet.

“Each generation must, in relative obscurity, face up to its mission: fulfill it or betray it.”

In the last century, an entire generation across the globe rose up and exposed itself to bullets, deportation, and torture, to drive European powers out of colonized territories. The revolutionary offensive of the colonized was a response to the domination exercised by white powers for more than a century. And, in the crucible of these struggles, in the maquis and prisons of the West, in the first liberated territories, the political consciences of those who would plan the future were forged. The forms and concepts available in this already globalized world were those of Western history: the nation-state, progress, planning, regional development, national identities, representative democracy, nationalism, socialism … Ousting colonialists was not enough: the same captivatingly modern master’s tools were used to construct the post-colonial states, and they produced the same contradictions.

The promise opened up by the end of colonial empires, in the wake of national revolutions, gave way to a colossal hangover. Flags, anthems, and currencies have changed. Domination continued in other forms. The national bourgeoisies and political elites that emerged from the independence movements often succumbed to authoritarianism. After sacrificing the most militant among them, the new political classes in the countries of the South took their share of the fruits of post-colonial exploitation. In Arab countries, for example, twenty-first century uprisings shook the foundations of regimes that had remained unchanged or almost unchanged since the early days of colonization, most of which had become police states. Frozen in the historical postures of decolonization and front-line resistance to Western imperialism, the parties in power seemed able to stifle popular aspirations for change for all eternity. But the return of the people has reshuffled the deck. As the Algerian Hirak demonstrators proclaimed: the 2019 uprising attempted to finish the job of the unfinished revolution of 1962.

While a demand for democracy lies at the heart of many recent uprisings, it’s hard to find a place where democracy is fully embodied. The “democratic ideal,” as it’s still presented in the West, can no longer conceal what a sham it is. One only needs to look at a few images from the American election in the spring of 2024 to be convinced—in one of the “greatest democracies in the world.” Before Kamala Harris entered the race after the Democratic candidate’s near-cerebral death, two white, rich, Christian men in their seventies were clinging to power, vying with each other in tackling their respective symptoms of senility, instead of having political debates about the future of the world—a world which the United States has largely dominated and shaped for more than seventy years. The “democratic” deadlock which this image signifies bears similarity to the fifth presidential candidacy of a mummified Bouteflika—the final candidacy which sparked off the 2019 revolt in Algeria.

Democracy is not a Western invention extending from the assemblies of Athens to the French Republic, and now being exported to Afghanistan and Iraq with bombs. From the Haudenesaunee Confederacy in North America to the Haitian Revolution, via the fugitive territories of ‘Zomia’ in South-East Asia, throughout history countless peoples have developed egalitarian deliberative practices to organize communal life. Indeed, the hijacking of the concept of democracy by the West has made it repellent in some parts of the world. So how can we avoid abandoning the idea of power to the people? How can we combat the sham of liberal democracies without playing into the hands of authoritarian regimes?

Stopping this world

The face of Empire is changing, the face of war is changing, and so our strategies and our objectives cannot remain the same. In addition to suffering under authoritarian or oligarchic regimes, we have to deal directly or indirectly with the consequences of competing imperialist offensives that can destroy the already precarious living conditions in our territories overnight. Hunger riots are a daily occurrence across the globe. Rival powers are taking turns to use ‘food as a weapon’ in a world where societies’ ability to be self-sufficient has been methodically destroyed and where the vagaries of the climate are making harvests more uncertain than ever. In 2024 Vladimir Putin has put the whole of the Mediterranean in his power by monopolizing wheat production on Ukraine’s fertile plains, upon which most Mediterranean countries are dependent. Food sovereignty has thus become a central issue in any politics of emancipation, transforming ways of struggle on every continent. No revolutionary perspective today can ignore how to reappropriate the means to meet our basic needs.

In this new phase of open armed conflict, aggressive power strategies, and nationalist revival, we are faced with the contradiction between our desire for a cooperative world in which people can organize for subsistence, and the reality of permanent threats posed by inter-imperialist conflicts. Wouldn’t a ‘liberated’ area, or state, which voluntarily abandoned policies of accumulation and monopolization immediately be swallowed up by rival powers?

In many parts of the world, behind the façade of order imposed by the sovereign state, community or religious militias, mafias, territorial gangs, and transnational corporations exist, to whom the repression of our movements and control of our communities are delegated. So, invoking the end of the state as the only horizon for revolution is not enough. The idea seems completely alien to those of us who, living under failed states, are left at the mercy of gang leaders and war lords, with no recourse in the face of poverty, disease, famine, or natural disasters. Destroying or fragmenting the states that crush people will not be enough, nor will simply replacing those who embody them. It’s only by coming together collectively and taking control of our basic needs for safety, health, access to housing and food that we will be able to claim our independence from Empire beyond the moment of insurrection.

The world unified by Empire, whatever language it speaks, whatever god it prays to, whatever currency it uses—Dollar, Euro, Yuan or any other—is not compatible with any other. Its only outcome will be the extermination of life on Earth. All it knows is hegemony, the world as one; counted, mapped, developed, and made uninhabitable by a macabre rush towards the end. If nothing is done, our end will come before theirs. There is no going back, just as there is no maintaining the status quo. There is only a forward march, sometimes resolute, sometimes hazardous, only knowing where we’ve come from. We must break out of our national prism and think of a policy which is internationalist from the outset—reconstructing a world made up of a multitude of worlds. Worlds that are compatible and in the process of becoming so, and that are themselves riven by struggles and contradictions. There’s a need to build a common plan between these worlds. A plan that will enable us to circumvent Empire, hasten its fall, and imagine the aftermath.

Revolution?

/ Sooner or later, it will fall / Rupture by insistence / The organizational dilemma / Choose boldness, measure risk / Defending the revolution / The evidence of popular power /

In 2011, what commentators called the “Arab Spring,” insurgents called “thawra” (revolution). Revolution in Burkina Faso (2014), the “revolution of dignity” in Ukraine (2014), a “spring revolution” in Myanmar (2021), the “revolution of our time” in Hong Kong (2019), Jina’s revolution in Iran (2022). “Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!” chanted the crowd in yellow vests on the Champs Elysée (2019) reminding the rich of Paris of a refrain that weighs like a threat they thought they’d gotten rid of for good.

A few years after its sensational comeback, the fact that so few are asking the revolutionary question is testimony to the strength of the counter-revolution underway. The fact that so many people have recognized themselves as revolutionaries is not a sign of misplaced enthusiasm or youthful reverie. We must never underestimate what the real movement is announcing, to do so risks being swept away by the torrents of history.

Revolution is not an event to be studied, a theory to be developed, a cold body to be dissected. It’s a question asked of ourselves, the “we” that shapes this text. And contrary to what ideologues, intellectuals, and prophets have always asserted, the answer is never absolute or eternal; it can only be momentary, provisional, situational. A glimmer of truth. We have sought to gather the scattered fragments, assemble and interrogate them to see what they might tell us about the future.

Sooner or later, it will fall

Storming palaces and parliaments came back into fashion with the uprisings of 2011. For many participants, the revolution meant the fall of the regime. But hopes raised by the fall of governments in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Ukraine were short-lived. Authoritarian or liberal takeovers, foreign intervention, economic crisis, civil war … Removing tyrants is not synonymous with the victory of revolution.

Conversely, the failure to topple regimes in Syria or Iran has not meant the absence of revolutionary achievement. The rejection of the compulsory hijab (veil) and control over ‘morality’ imposed by the Islamic Republic was a radical fracture. Likewise, Syrians’ ability to organize themselves to administer territories liberated from the State collectively, represented an irreversible break with Assad’s totalitarianism. This explains why, thirteen years on, despite brutal counter-insurgency, the revolution’s flag continues to fly high in the provinces of northern Syria that remain beyond regime control, as in the rebellious province of Sweida, in the south of the country. In both Syria and Iran, the revolution has proved an existential turning point and the regime’s hold on bodies and minds has been partially broken. Sooner or later, they will fall.

No single event can put an end to all forms of domination. For a long time, the Grand Soir was the image par excellence of revolution. But repeated failure to bring about profound and lasting change by “seizing central power,” and the eternal appeals of traditional organizations to wait until “the conditions are right,” have led many to abandon the ideal of the fall of the regime as a strategic horizon and look for other prospects for liberation. For many, since the end of the last century, revolution is a process that begins without waiting. A determined but gradual march towards profound transformation embodied in a constellation of events, acts, interventions, ideas, feelings and everyday practices. El tiempo de la revolución es ahora (the time for revolution is now) say feminists in Argentina. Revolution is conceived as being no longer distant, but a way of life and a struggle in the here and now.

The challenge is to dismantle the structures that oppress us. The major strategic imperative is to stop sacrificing the means—or the struggle of some—in the name of an end which is always postponed. This conception of politics as transformation, rather than the conquest of power, relocates revolutionary politics in praxis and in the intimate, previously lacking in the work of so many organizations and activists. It’s about building a radically new life, a new relationship to one’s community, to desire, to money, to care, and even to one’s struggle.

Viewing revolution as a process is not inconsistent with the conviction that the moment of insurrection is central to it. Whatever the outcome, an uprising is always a decisive event. Even in defeat, it leaves irrefutable and embodied experiences. Countless seeds grow in its wake. If, on the other hand, revolution does succeed in toppling a regime, then something promising and perilous is born.

Rupture by insistence

To conceive of revolution without rupture, remaining oblivious to unexpected opportunities, would risk allowing our actions to exist independently of the world around us. For many revolutionaries, revolution as a gradual process means building material and political autonomy, through collective or territorial forms of self-sufficiency. This quest to break away from dependence on the centers has spread to the forests, mountains, and cities of the world. The construction of autonomy has given rise to spaces that are firmly rooted in the world, and which run counter to the infernal march imposed by Empire. Autonomy can take many forms. It can be rooted in a thousand-year-old history, or be entirely new. It can be embodied in a local assembly, an agricultural cooperative, a community canteen, a neighborhood union, a transnational queer solidarity network, or a media collective.

Yet, the construction of autonomy, which is costly in terms of time and energy, can easily become avoidance if it ignores real historical changes and is not challenged by them. Ideologically ‘pure’ insurrections can never exist. Moments of popular revolt are unique opportunities to multiply forces tenfold and scale up experiments. Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming an isolated, “alternative” niche, easily subsumed into capitalism or by the State. Remaining barricaded behind certainties and our own everyday experience condemns us to perpetual failure. The risk of conceiving autonomy as an unchanging form, punctuated by more or less agitation, locks us into cultural trench warfare, which we can only lose because of our adversaries’ colossal resources. We cannot live as we want without dismantling apparatuses of power that regulate social life and control where we live. But we cannot dismantle apparatuses of power alone.

Uprisings break through isolation. They allow for giant leaps forward. They make for unprecedented coalitions and constitute a moment of mass offensive, without which there can be no tipping points or irreversible change. Whether we are members of an agricultural cooperative or a media collective, an affinity group or mass organization, being alert to the possibility of the real movement erupting enables us to deploy forces effectively in the brief moments of opportunity that may present themselves.

Process and event. Perhaps this is the thoroughgoing revolution; the intersection of two ways of seeing and experiencing revolution. On the one hand, the present, patient, ongoing construction of our autonomy, the meticulous preparation for our encounter, the strengthening of our forces. On the other, the eruptive and explosive nature of the uprising, with its exceptional concentration of energies, its unequaled deployment of popular power, its creativity. Thoroughgoing revolutions are made possible by sequences of uprisings that meet and exceed their limits, in search of that rupture through insistence, as a Chilean comrade said.

We never start from scratch. Every insurrection, every experiment in popular power, every assault on Empire is part of a deeper movement, behind us and ahead of us at the same time, below the surface and looming over the horizon. A tidal wave starts out as an imperceptible current in the middle of the ocean. And it becomes one again after crashing against the shore. We need to learn to act as an undercurrent as much as a tsunami. Perhaps this is the full meaning of the mantra of Hong Kong’s revolution: Be water my friend.

The organizational dilemma

The popular mobilizations of our time have often been heterogeneous and diffuse. They’ve rarely been led by traditional organizations, nor defined by pre-existing political ideologies. The more or less spontaneous and horizontal self-organization, impressive though it was in the early days, was insufficient. The decentralized nature of our movements was both their strength and their weakness. The lack of any consistent organizational capacity or medium- to long-term strategic vision, combined with the difficulty of maintaining street tactics, meant that we were caught between repression and co-optation. In some cases, we lacked organizations to take up the revolutionary cause.

In Ecuador during the 2019 revolt, major Indigenous organizations and trade unions were able to mobilize millions of people from across the country and bring them to the capital to reinforce the ranks of insurgents. Due to their strength of appeal, logistical resources, and coordination skills, the movement was able to confront the authorities on several fronts and finally obtain the withdrawal of the contested government measures. This impressive capacity for mobilization reminds us of the potential strength of organizations, but we must also be mindful of their dangers.

Many have become disillusioned with historic organizations of the left because of their bureaucratic tendencies, their attempts to co-opt the movement, or their desire to direct it. Organizational intervention always carries the risk of limiting the spread of the uprising and curbing the radical nature of its demands, its creativity, and sometimes even its nascent popular institutions. Whether it comes from the far right, religious fundamentalists, or certain organized fringes on the left, there will always be groups seeking to push their own agenda during uprisings. Without organizational and strategic consistency, it’s difficult to prevent these factions from seizing power, and we are left at the mercy of their strategies.

An organization is both a concentration of energy and resources; and a network of connections capable of constituting a collective force. In certain contexts, organizations may be necessary, not only to prevent hijacking by reactionary or liberal forces, but also to help a movement achieve its aims. But how can the power of organizations within an uprising be circumscribed? How can we guard against the centralizing effects that organizations inevitably produce? How can we build the strength of the movement as a whole and not just the strength of the organization? A genuinely revolutionary organization is at one with the movement, striving to nourish the strength of the emerging popular powers, keeping the flame of revolt alive at the risk of extinguishing itself. And it can only do this by avoiding imposing its own agenda, its own dogma, its own way of doing or saying things.

In many uprisings, behind the apparent spontaneity of forms of self-organization, we may detect connections built between groups that existed prior to the moment of insurrection: local communities, political affiliations, religious or traditional institutions, professional or sporting societies which together form a substratum that enables something other than chaos to be. But how can we, mid-turbulence, formulate a coherent strategy to coordinate a revolution? During the Sudanese revolution, the hybridization between the organizational experiences of the student movement, former Communist Party activists, and the forces born of the popular revolt allowed resistance committees to come into being. The most promising experiences have been those in which there has been an encounter between partisan forms, constructed over many years, and new forms born of the event. Encounters only happen when both parties are transformed. A willingness to change is essential for any revolutionary force. Make plans: but draw them in pencil.

Choose boldness, measure risk

No single force can be expected to establish a plan for all. Thinking of ourselves as part of a movement that transcends us, rather than as an organization or chapel to be defended at all costs, means behaving and thinking in a complementary, rather than competitive manner. Maximizing the power of a common movement means finding the best combination of tactics to suit the respective situations of each component part. The Kurdish movement combines armed struggle with the election of mayors and deputies to the Turkish assembly. Burma’s pacifist resistance movement for democracy has transformed into an armed struggle with the support of a diaspora that raises funds through queer events and online video games. Lebanese revolutionaries have built self-managed cooperatives as well as trying to reclaim professional organizations.

Avoid fetishizing one mode of action over another and try out new hybridizations. Going against tactical and ideological rigidities opens up new ways of articulating strategies for transformation. No one can say a priori what a revolutionary act should be. A movement gains in strength if it listens to, explores, and connects the different spheres of struggle that challenge the status quo. It must avoid militant dogmatism and aesthetic posturing, without ever neglecting ethical development.

Ethical questions are not incidental to revolutionary strategy, they are at its heart. Working out how to do things together is essential. So is measuring the risks we’re willing to take for ourselves and for others. Keep in touch with what mattered at the start. Always remember what sets us apart from counter-revolutionary forces. Such principles enable us to thread our way through the storm of an uprising. As our Argentinian comrades used to say, if we do not want to reproduce the kind of power we’re fighting against, we must not confront it or regard it as a rival. As a result of the mirror effect, through facing and looking at each other, we always end up mimicking our opponents. When revolutionary forces hope to beat the centers at their own game, they become a deformed and misguided reflection of them.

The path of strategic articulation also involves learning from experience. In recent years, we have again seen how movements that focus on the institutional route, in a quest for concrete change at the expense of building political and material autonomy, are regularly co-opted. And those that assume they can pursue both insurrectionary and institutional avenues in parallel find themselves exhausted. In Argentina, feminists broke down the paralyzing dichotomy between reform and revolution by seeing potential victories in the implementation of direct institutional reforms, such as the legalization of abortion. But beset by fascist forces, after several defeats on the institutional terrain and unproductive alliances with a powerless and discredited progressivism, the movement found itself unable to preserve internal strength. The means for political autonomy was lost. There was no fallback strategy when the institutional route failed.

Both Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain seem to have reached the same impasse when they focused on institutional spaces of power: what followed was a disconnection with the popular mobilization, compromise with neoliberal policies, generalized disappointment, and a feeling of betrayal. But remaining outside institutions is neither an objective nor a question of principle. A reform, an election, and perhaps even a presidential candidacy can in certain situations serve the revolutionary cause. We must ensure that such moments serve to strengthen the revolutionary movement and its autonomy and are not merely a chance to launch the political career of inevitable opportunists. When it comes to tactics and devising strategies, inventiveness is what breaks new ground.

Defending the revolution

When the centers loose political ground, weapons intervene. This grim fact condemns most revolutions to war. Resorting to armed struggle is rarely a strategic choice. It’s the level of State violence that determines if and when revolutionaries are forced to pick up arms. Pacifism cannot defend itself against a State, or groups within it, that are prepared to exterminate an entire population to quell a revolt. But the arrival of arms in a revolutionary movement is always a threat to its survival because when they enter the scene, the whole movement is impacted. Many revolutionaries have said how militarization severed them from active participation in the insurrection, when “being a revolutionary” became synonymous with “carrying a gun.” Women and gender dissidents in particular often find themselves marginalized by the militarization of an insurrection. The use of armed violence irreversibly marks the course of a movement and serves to legitimize ever more violent repression by the State against the population as a whole. Our primary concern should be that the taking up of weapons does not radically change a movement’s objectives, composition, and political texture. When taking up arms is inevitable, efforts need to be made to prevent the armed struggle from becoming the sole horizon of the uprising. Survival on the military terrain cannot be the sole lever.

When a State’s armed forces defect, as in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, something decisive is in play. Defectors often bring their weapons with them, but rarely enough to counter a state’s arsenal. Access to weapons and the financial resources to buy them becomes the alpha and omega of revolutionary struggle, often justifying alliances which, however judicious they may seem at the time, prove dangerous, even fatal, before long.

Unfortunately, the military balance of power often determines scope for revolution. The profoundly asymmetrical nature of confrontation with the State apparatus and superpowers places revolutionaries at a significant disadvantage. Syria and Sudan, two of the most promising and thoroughgoing revolutions of our time, have had painful experiences of this. Towns and villages were reduced to rubble and drowned in blood; millions were displaced from their homes. The trauma will take generations to heal.

Victory for a resistance or revolutionary movement often comes down not to having as many weapons as possible but rather to preventing adversaries from using theirs. The question of defending the revolution is as much a military question as a political one. Whenever possible, the challenge may be to attempt, while there is still time, to deactivate the military apparatus as effectively as possible. Blockade barracks, imprison generals, disarm institutions. But even if successful, what then? What can be done when an outside intervention or an attempt at domestic containment tries to regain control by force? And even if that doesn’t happen, what about the militias and armed gangs who, as in Haiti and Ecuador, try to take advantage of the situation? When weapons intervene, a popular uprising can easily turn into a cacophony of competing authoritarianisms, delivering people into the hands of warlords.

The relationship between the local and the transnational, and the nature of the links built between peoples, revolutionary forces, and popular organizations across the globe, are crucial to preventing revolts from becoming isolated. International support is a major asset on the revolutionaries’ side, which can exert significant pressure depending on the situation. At best it can prevent bloodshed, and at least buy time to organize self-defense. This is one of the horizons of revolutionary internationalism.

The evidence of popular power

“Why build a ‘counter-power’? We are the people. We should have power!” This reflection, formulated by a Yellow Vest protester at an assembly in France, is perhaps the best expression of the aspiration for popular power that we’ve heard. The revolution we seek is neither the refusal of power, nor its negation. That would mean perpetually leaving power in the hands of our adversaries. We cannot be content to always be a dam, a brake, an opposition, even permanent, to the domination of the centers. Popular power is, on the contrary, the active search and living construction of a collective way of forging a new legitimacy, of exercising a different kind of power.

Recent revolts everywhere have sought to increase popular power, or at least to prevent the confiscation of power by a few. Some, in Syria, Hong Kong, Ukraine, or Algeria, thought they were achieving this by demanding a democratic state; or by demanding the abolition or defunding of the police in the United States; or a permanent Citizens Initiative Referendum in France; by ousting the French neo-colonialists and their accomplices in West Africa; by establishing confederalism in Kurdistan or changing the constitution in Chile. The insurgents wanted more power, but that didn’t always mean they wanted to govern.

Others, like some of us, thought that extending the power of the people meant above all building popular power in the heart and in the wake of revolt. Beginning to build from below, from what had already begun to mutate, the principles of self-government that could serve as the architecture for the aftermath of the uprising. Building autonomous power without leaving it to a few vanguards, leaders, officers, or new governments. Removing central power and building popular power.

After the fall of the regime, the resistance committees of the Sudanese revolution, faced with the contradictions and paralysis of the first transitional government, drew up a proposal for the future of the country, so as not to leave the field to the old guard politicians. The Charter for the Establishment of the People’s Authority outlines a new form of governance. It proposes the establishment of a localized, bottom-up system of power in which the civil and popular forms of organization that emerged from the revolution retain a say in the legislative process and the balance of power. It also demands the fair distribution of the country’s wealth and an end to plunder by foreign powers, whoever they may be. With this proposal, Sudanese were trying to defend the revolution without resort to arms. Although the Sudanese revolution seems to have been cornered in a bloody impasse, it certainly has not said its last word. As a Sudanese comrade once said: revolution has become a religion in Sudan.

In Mexico, the struggle for the autonomy of popular powers and the defense of the revolution have never ceased since the first decade of revolts in 1910 which led to the establishment of the Mexican state. For over a hundred years, despite the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s decades long capture of power, the attempts at liberal counter-revolution supported by the United States, and the betrayals of the social-democratic left, a patient strategic wisdom has been woven in every territory, from remote Indigenous communities to the working-class districts of the big cities. Grassroots movements of slum dwellers or rural teachers’ unions, Indigenous councils, community police forces, neighborhood councils, and autonomous health facilities have flourished in a country that is known to be “one of the most violent in the world.” Nowhere else has community power been taken so far. While these experiments are still threatened by many reactionary forces and face the authorities’ corruption, they have demonstrated their ability to take root and resist for decades.

People power is the opposite of powerlessness. It means taking the time to climb the rungs of the ladder, one by one, and not relying on those who want to capture our votes. People Power. These two words in their naked simplicity. Power as the ability to act, to decide, to implement. Popular as diverse, as direct, as transversal, as here, as everywhere, and as now. Popular power as a guarantee against any further electoral betrayal, as an offensive against the status quo, as the only antidote to fascism.

* * *

If revolution is a question, then we can neither win or lose. Only battles can be won or lost. Always partial, sometimes decisive, never definitive. Revolution is the inextinguishable yearning for dignity, and the constant search, for several millennia now, for how to embody it on this Earth.

How can nascent popular powers be protected from the risk of civil war? Is there an alternative to taking up arms, or is it an inevitable horizon of revolution? Is the establishment of a revolutionary power on a “national” scale, in place of the one we are fighting, an indispensable stage in making change irreversible? Or, on the contrary, should we consolidate popular power everywhere to prevent it being brought to heel by the new state apparatus, however revolutionary? We do not have the answers to these questions, which so many revolutionaries have already asked. The search for a theory that would provide the secret formula for victory is a dead end. There is only experimentation, placing bets and more or less fertile strategic compositions. Some will base their answers on the strength of revolutionary organizations, others on emerging forms of territorial power, still others on the unifying power of religions and ideologies. Others will base their responses on a clever mix of all of these.

The path of revolution is not a straight line. It will be like a streak of stars, a series of conflagrations lighting up the night, each one pointing the way more clearly than the last, until we finally pass the point of no return.

Starting over

“And at dawn, armed with ardent patience, we will enter the splendid cities”

Over the last five years, following a number of gatherings, we’ve begun to weave a network that transcends borders, rooted in myriad spaces and territories intent on governing themselves. This is a network comprising individuals and collectives inspired by the cycle of popular uprisings that have taken place in the years since 2011, seeing in these a source of energy and a signal of major upheavals to come.

We’ve opened up a space where the revolutionaries of Khartoum’s resistance committees can exchange ideas and analysis with feminists and members of territorial assemblies in Santiago; where the determined youth of Sri Lanka’s GotaGoGama villages mingle with participants in the ecological struggles of France and the United States. Where grassroots movements from Mexico City’s working class neighborhoods talk to members of local councils from insurgent Syria, and Lebanese and Iraqi farmers connect with Indigenous peoples of Abya Yala. Barely a month after the uprising in Iran in 2022, Iranian exiles were able to debate with activists from grassroots movements in West Africa what the fall of the regime meant and the meaning of the word “revolution.”

From there, we set about laying the foundations for a new kind of transnational force. A force that could draw on the pooling of our experiences and analyses and give itself the means to ensure that they are followed up by action. A force capable of concretely supporting present and future movements and uprisings.

I. Creating a transnational space for liaison

Our first task is to ensure that we are able to meet; to increase the number of connections between the various centers of the emerging revolutionary movement throughout the world. To create the material and logistical conditions for a planetary debate in which approaches to revolution are renewed. We want to create a space that will enable us to go beyond existing connections and enable the birth of a shared strategy. It is important that this new space should last, and be geographically diverse, in order that as many people as possible should recognize something of theirs in it, and something relevant to their experience and to their hopes.

II. Pooling and multiplying our resources

There can be no revolutionary force without material power. Making our perspectives clear and explicit, broadening and multiplying movement between our territories, offers us the possibility of finding material and financial resources, but also allies and tools which, once pooled, will increase our capacity to act.

We want to establish a network of material mutual aid as soon as possible, so that we can quickly offer support during wars, climatic disasters, or revolutions, and at the same time build the long-term infrastructures that will enable our struggles to become self-sustaining in the long term. The balance of these two timeframes is needed if our movements are to survive, maintain their independence, and grow in strength.

The resources available to us on our own small scale may rightly seem infinitesimal given the scale of the task. But we have all experienced circumstances where not only did everything seem possible, but everything happened, with each gesture leading to dozens of others along the way. Revolutionary mutual aid, like courage, can make itself contagious when the time comes.

III. Mapping a planet of friendly places

To meet and organize, we need places. Discreet but accessible places of welcome to which anyone forced to flee their country of origin can turn. We need places of refuge, retreat, care, and protection, places where we can find a little respite and “recharge our batteries.” Also, places dedicated to livelihood issues and training, but also places to dance, make music, share films, create together, and eat well. Many of these places already exist, but they are waiting to be placed on a common map. Connecting these places will be like a process of planetary neighborhooding, of mujawara as our Lebanese comrades say. It will materialize our common oath from one neighborhood to the next, from one village to the next, from one farm to the next.

Of course, we don’t all have the same level of mobility. Building safe and dignified routes of exile, by imagining multiple interconnected territories and stages to facilitate escape and movement, is a major challenge. Finding channels and tricks to enable us to bypass physical and administrative barriers and occasionally gather en masse in organized convoys. Let these routes also be stages for return journeys, coming and going, as state borders crack under the persistent action of our flows.

IV. Producing a transnational revolutionary culture

To disseminate our analyses, to compare them, to allow the experiences of our comrades from different parts of the world be heard everywhere, so that together we can develop a political education worthy of our times. In the medium term, to put in place the means for a major cultural offensive in each of our countries to encourage the return of a non-aligned popular internationalism. Working on building synergies between different types of political, territorial, and community organizations, independent media, communication channels, and cultural venues.

The task before us is to restore legitimacy to the revolutionary perspective by preventing our struggles from facing isolation. Relating histories and experiences that our adversaries want to keep apart. Connecting different fronts within an international revolutionary movement, both such as already exist and as are yet to be built. We can see the stars separated in the sky, or we can see them as constellations.

Between the improbable and the possible

Every dream, every hope for a different life hangs in a fragile equilibrium and oscillates between the shadow of doubt and the glow of certainty. We stand at a crossroads where aspirations for change confront realities of a collapsing world. We can continue to watch as the Empire drags us into the abyss, affecting not to know; we can surrender to general panic or lie prostrate, awaiting the end; or we can meticulously organize an exit plan, betting we can extract a plausible future from an improbable present. We need to find a revolutionary horizon, not just in order to survive, but to live a life worth living.

Now is the time to build structures that can withstand the storms of tomorrow. Now is the time to extend and consolidate our connections. Our respective circumstances will continue to deteriorate, but tipping points of all kinds will create opportunities for change that we can turn to our advantage, provided we are ready. Every step we take, every obstacle we overcome, brings us a little closer to significant victories—victories that can offer some comfort to the souls of those we have lost in battle, who are waiting to rest in peace.

To structure this new force that we are calling for, to give shape to its action, there is still much to be done. Success will depend on responses to the proposal we are making in this text … on the number and determination of those willing to work with us.

We are aware of the magnitude of the task. We are learning from the failures of our elders. We know the many threats we face. The odds are not in our favor. Perhaps we will not turn the tide, become that tsunami.

But as a Catalan friend once said: there are times when not to take risks is a risk not worth taking.

___

Notes:

i It was so hard to find each other, let’s never again be apart

ii Every Single One Means Every Single One

iii Out with Them All

iv Out of Here

v Women, Life, Freedom

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The post Revolutions of our Times- An Internationalist Manifesto by The Peoples Want appeared first on Void Network.

The economic system is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth. It is time to design a new one.

By George Monbiot / theguardian.com

For most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective but the noun.

While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly.

Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism.

I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th: it is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, that drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system.

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources. Last week a paper in the journal New Political Economy, by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st century there has been a recoupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion.

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.

In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called “wealth creation”, and bad capitalism, which he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction. But from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations.

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism.

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism.

Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit.

Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God.

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging.

Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben.

Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.

Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The post Dare to Declare Capitalism Dead – Before It Takes Us All Down With It appeared first on Void Network.

Κείμενο: Peter Gelderloos

https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/geopolitics-for-2024

Μετάφραση: Νίκος Γκατζίκης / Επιμέλεια: Τάσος Σαγρής (Κενό Δίκτυο)

Γεωπολιτική για αναρχικούς;

Η γεωπολιτική τείνει να είναι ένα πεδίο ανάλυσης για ειδικούς και δημοσιογράφους που ενδιαφέρονται για τoυς ανταγωνισμούς και τις τύχες των εθνών-κρατών, τις συμμαχίες τους και τους θεσμούς τους. Προσεγγίζουν το θέμα με ένα επίπεδο στρατηγικής παρόμοιο με αυτό των αθλητικών σχολιαστών στο κυριακάτικο ποδόσφαιρο: κατανοούν το ρεπερτόριο των παιγνιδιών, τα δυνατά και αδύνατα σημεία, αλλά ποτέ δεν θα αποδομήσουν την ιστορία του παιχνιδιού, ποτέ δεν θα αναρωτηθούν για τη σχέση μεταξύ του πάγκου και του γηπέδου, του προπονητή και του ιδιοκτήτη, των θεατών και των παικτών (δηλαδή, πέρα από ένα δημοκρατικό θέαμα: τα πάνε καλά μεταξύ τους; είναι οι οπαδοί ευχαριστημένοι με την ομάδα τους;) Δεν θα αναλύσουν την αρχιτεκτονική του σταδίου ή το διαφημιστικό διάλειμμα και σίγουρα δεν θα αναρωτηθούν αν υπάρχει κάποιο άλλο είδος παιχνιδιού που θα μπορούσαμε να παίζουμε. Χρειάζονται το παιχνίδι να συνεχίζεται για πάντα. Αν το παιχνίδι σταματήσει, θα εξαφανιστούν.

Μερικοί αναρχικοί μπορεί να σκεφτούν, ότι αφού θέλουμε να καταργήσουμε τα έθνη-κράτη, γιατί να ασχολούμαστε με τα ασήμαντα στρατηγικά τους παιχνίδια; Γιατί να θέλουμε να τα κατανοήσουμε με τους δικούς τους όρους;

Είναι απολύτως αληθές ότι οι αναρχικοί δεν θα εμφανιστούν ποτέ ως παίκτες στο ταμπλό του γεωπολιτικού Μεγάλου Ρίσκου. Έχουμε βγει εντελώς από αυτόν τον χάρτη. Και έτσι πρέπει να είναι. Αν είμαστε αναρχικοί, είναι γιατί προσεγγίζουμε τη στρατηγική και την εξουσία από μια εντελώς διαφορετική σκοπιά, και με εντελώς διαφορετικές επιθυμίες και μεθόδους.

Αλλά προς το παρόν, είναι το γεωπολιτικό σύστημα των κρατών και του καπιταλισμού που είναι το πιο ενεργό στην παραγωγή του μέλλοντος μέσα στο οποίο θα αναγκαστούμε να κατοικήσουμε. Η γνώση του εύρους των πιθανών μελλοντικών εξελίξεων μας βοηθά να κατανοήσουμε το σύστημα με το οποίο βρισκόμαστε αντιμέτωποι και να προετοιμαστούμε για όσα πρόκειται να αντιμετωπίσουμε.

Αν νομίζεις ότι μια ταινία αποκαλυπτικής καταστροφής με ζόμπι —ή πραγματικά οποιαδήποτε άλλη ταινία “αποκάλυψης”— παρουσιάζει ένα ρεαλιστικό σενάριο για το πώς μοιάζει η συστημική κατάρρευση, τότε θα χαραμίσεις τον χρόνο σου άδικα σε λάθος τρόπους προετοιμασίας για τις επερχόμενες καταστροφές.

Τα τελευταία είκοσι χρόνια, έχω ακούσει πολλούς αναρχικούς να κάνουν σοβαρές προβλέψεις για το πού κατευθυνόμασταν και ποιους κινδύνους αντιμετωπίζαμε. Αυτές οι προβλέψεις είναι τολμηρά εγχειρήματα και χρήσιμα, γιατί μας επιτρέπουν να δοκιμάζουμε τις θεωρίες μας.

Πολλές προβλέψεις που θυμάμαι έχουν αποδειχθεί λανθασμένες.

• Ο Τραμπ δεν έκανε πραξικόπημα: στην πραγματικότητα, ο Τζον Μπόλτον μιλούσε από εμπειρία όταν έλεγε ότι ένα πραξικόπημα απαιτεί πολύ περισσότερη οργάνωση.
• Οι φασίστες δεν κατέκτησαν την εξουσία- αποτελούν όμως κίνδυνο κυρίως για τους ανθρώπους σε επίπεδο δρόμου και στον τρόπο με τον οποίο ωθούν την κεντροδεξιά προς τα δεξιά όσον αφορά την αποδεκτή πολιτική που μπορεί να εφαρμόσει μια δημοκρατική κυβέρνηση. (ΣτΜ: από τότε που γράφτηκε το άρθρο υπήρξαν εξελίξεις στην Ιταλία που είτε περιπλέκουν τα πράγματα, είτε ενισχύουν αυτό το σημείο σαν μια εξαίρεση που επιβεβαιώνει τον κανόνα…)
• Η προώθηση του αντιφασισμού εν μέσω ενός αναπτυσσόμενου αντιρατσιστικού κινήματος ήταν σφάλμα, ένα βήμα προς τα πίσω. Όπως έκανε και στις προηγούμενες εκδοχές του, ο αντιφασισμός έβγαλε από το επίκεντρο της συζήτησης τα ζητήματα της λευκής υπεροχής και της αποικιοκρατίας και επέτρεψε στην Αριστερά να κερδίσει έδαφος σε κινήματα που προηγουμένως ήταν αντι-κρατικά: μας άφησε απροετοίμαστους τη στιγμή που ο πραγματικός φασισμός υποχωρούσε ενώ το δημοκρατικό Κράτος έκανε βήματα εμπρός και εναντίον μας.
• Η Δημοκρατία αντιμετωπίζει κρίση, αλλά εξακολουθεί να αποτελεί τον μεγαλύτερο κίνδυνο για εμάς: η ευρύτερη διάδοση αυτής της επίγνωσης θα μπορούσε να είχε σώσει μερικά από τα πιο ισχυρά μας κινήματα — στη Χιλή και στην Ελλάδα — από το να πέσουν σε θανατηφόρα στρατηγικά αδιέξοδα. Θα είχε επίσης βελτιώσει την αρχική διατύπωση των κινημάτων Occupy και 15M (ΣτΜ: το “Κίνημα των Αγανακτισμένων” της Ισπανίας), επιτρέποντάς τα να αναπτυχθούν σε πολύ πιο ριζοσπαστικές κατευθύνσεις.
• Ο “ύστερος καπιταλισμός” ή το “τελικό στάδιο του καπιταλισμού” που διακηρύχθηκε μετά τον Α’ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο εξακολουθεί να αργοσέρνεται. Η απόρριψη του Μαρξισμού θα μας επέτρεπε να δούμε πιο καθαρά το ζωτικό στρατηγικό, κρατικοκίνητο στοιχείο του καπιταλισμού: τα κράτη και οι θεσμοί τους κατακτούν νέες περιοχές προληπτικά, για να εξασφαλίσουν την καπιταλιστική επέκταση.
• Αν ήμασταν σε επιφυλακή για αυτά τα νέα μέτωπα θα είχαμε κερδίσει ένα προβάδισμα και θα είχαμε εντοπίσει έγκαιρα το κυρίαρχο ρεύμα του κλιματικού κινήματος και της πράσινης ενέργειας ως τις μεγαλύτερες απειλές για τη ζωή σε αυτόν τον πλανήτη. Τώρα, πρέπει να προσπαθήσουμε να καλύψουμε το χαμένο έδαφος.

Με ανησυχεί πάρα πολύ ότι, απ’ όσο έχω δει, οι άνθρωποι που έκαναν λανθασμένες προβλέψεις δεν παραδέχτηκαν τα λάθη τους. Θα ήταν θαρραλέο, ειλικρινές, και θα μας είχε ενισχύσει πάρα πολύ, δίνοντάς μας περισσότερες ευκαιρίες να ακονίσουμε τα θεωρητικά μας εργαλεία, να καλλιεργήσουμε την στρατηγική μας διαίσθηση.

Και νομίζω ότι το Εγώ, αυτή η τυφλή αποφυγή των λαθών μας, ήταν ένας σημαντικός παράγοντας που οδήγησε τους ριζοσπαστικούς ανθρώπους σε όλο τον κόσμο σε ακόμη μεγαλύτερα, προφανή λάθη. Οι απογοητευμένοι υποψήφιοι επαναστάτες, στρέφονται σε μονοθεματικούς ακτιβισμούς, αμεσοδημοκρατικές κοινότητες, ή στις τελευταίου τύπου σταλινικές σέχτες με αυστηρά καθορισμένες οργανώσεις, προσεκτικά επιλεγμένο προλεταριακό μάτσο ανδρισμό και χωρίς πραγματική εμπλοκή ή σχέση με την ίδια την κοινωνική σύγκρουση.

Προς ποια κατεύθυνση κινείται το παγκόσμιο σύστημα;

Συνοψίζοντας, το παγκόσμιο σύστημα κατανοεί τον εαυτό του ως παγκόσμιο και διαμεσολαβεί σε πολιτικές συγκρούσεις και στη ροή πόρων και πληροφοριών σύμφωνα με μια ορισμένη λογική. Κάθε διαδοχικό παγκόσμιο σύστημα έχει ένα ηγετικό κράτος, αλλά αυτός ο ηγέτης δεν έχει τη δύναμη να ελέγχει τα πάντα που συμβαίνουν στο παγκόσμιο σύστημα: αντίθετα, είναι ο αρχιτέκτονας που σε μια κρίσιμη στιγμή αποκτά τη δύναμη και τη νομιμοποίηση, την ηγεμονία, να σχεδιάσει ένα νέο παγκόσμιο σύστημα στο οποίο όλοι οι άλλοι κυρίαρχοι παίκτες συμφωνούν να συμμετάσχουν.

Μετά τον Δεύτερο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, οι ΗΠΑ ανέλαβαν από το Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο και έγιναν οι αρχιτέκτονες του επόμενου παγκόσμιου συστήματος, επικεντρωμένο σε μια υποτιθέμενη παγκόσμια τάξη κρατών που κυβερνάται από τον ΟΗΕ, με έδρα στη Νέα Υόρκη, και ένα καπιταλιστικό καθεστώς ελεύθερου εμπορίου και επενδύσεων που εποπτεύεται από τα ιδρύματα του Μπρέτον Γουντς όπως το Διεθνές Νομισματικό Ταμείο.

Οι ΗΠΑ και οι πιο στενοί τους σύμμαχοι δεν είναι πλέον οι κύριες κινητήριες δυνάμεις της οικονομικής ανάπτυξης και το μερίδιο των νέων επενδύσεων που καταλαμβάνουν μειώνεται. Πολιτικά, το μπλοκ του ΝΑΤΟ είχε επεκτείνει τον ιστό των συμμαχιών του σε περιοχές που ανήκαν εδώ και καιρό στη ρωσική σφαίρα επιρροής. Η Ρωσία αντεπιτίθεται στην Ουκρανία, αλλά οι διαιρέσεις εντός του ΝΑΤΟ και της ΕΕ έχουν πρόσφατα ακινητοποιήσει αυτές τις συμμαχίες, έτσι ενώ η Ρωσία συνεχίζει να λαμβάνει οπλισμό και οικονομική υποστήριξη από τους συμμάχους της, η δυτική χρηματοδότηση για την Ουκρανία έχει σταματήσει να παίζει τον κρίσιμο ρόλο.

Αλλού, η Ρωσία έχει υποστεί ταπεινωτικές ήττες, όπως με την αδυναμία της να υποστηρίξει την Αρμενία ενάντια στον επεκτατισμό του Αζερμπαϊτζάν, το οποίο υποστηρίζεται από την Τουρκία. Όταν η Τουρκία προσχώρησε στο ΝΑΤΟ κατά τη διάρκεια του Ψυχρού Πολέμου, αυτό ήταν μια μεγάλη νίκη για τη στρατιωτική συμμαχία καθώς επέφερε μερική περικύκλωση της Ρωσίας. Αλλά τώρα, η Τουρκία ενεργεί σε στρατηγικό επίπεδο σαν μια αδέσμευτη χώρα, ακόμη και αν συνεχίζει να διατηρεί το δικαίωμα του βέτο εντός του ΝΑΤΟ.

Κατά τη διάρκεια του Ψυχρού Πολέμου, οι αδέσμευτες χώρες αποτελούνταν από κράτη που ήταν πολύ πιο αδύναμα οικονομικά και στρατιωτικά από τις ΗΠΑ και τη Ρωσία, αλλά που μπορούσαν σταδιακά να βελτιώσουν τη θέση τους κρατώντας ανοιχτές τις πόρτες τους και στα δύο μπλοκ, ουσιαστικά πηγαίνοντας με όποιον θα τους έδινε την καλύτερη συμφωνία.

Έτσι, η Τουρκία εξυπηρετεί ουσιαστικά τα δικά της συμφέροντα, ενάντια τόσο στις ΗΠΑ/ΕΕ όσο και στη Ρωσία, καθώς και σε άλλους μεσαίους αντιπάλους προς τα νότια και ανατολικά της, για παράδειγμα με τον τρόπο που έχει χρησιμοποιήσει σουνιτικές φονταμενταλιστικές ομάδες σχετιζόμενες με το Ισλαμικό Κράτος ενάντια τόσο στο Ιράν όσο και στους Κούρδους.

Τα μέλλοντα

Όταν ένα παγκόσμιο σύστημα παραπαίει, οι γενικές επιλογές είναι:

α) το σύστημα ανανεώνεται και επανεφευρίσκεται με επιτυχία, με τον παλιό ηγέτη να λανσάρει μια αναμορφωμένη αρχιτεκτονική

β) ένας νέος ηγέτης εξασφαλίζει την εξουσία και τη νομιμοποίηση να κερδίσει την υποστήριξη μιας νέας αρχιτεκτονικής, αρχίζοντας ένα νέο παγκόσμιο σύστημα

γ) οι άνθρωποι αυξάνουν τις ικανότητες τους για αντίσταση στο Κράτος και κερδίζουμε μια παγκόσμια επανάσταση, καταστρέφοντας το παγκόσμιο σύστημα και αποτρέποντας τη δημιουργία ενός νέου

δ) το τρέχον παγκόσμιο σύστημα παραμένει στη θέση του, διαβρώνεται και διολισθαίνει όλο και περισσότερο σε παγκόσμιο πόλεμο μέχρι τελικά να συμβεί η επιλογή α, β ή γ.

Ένας Νέος Αμερικανικός Αιώνας

Αναφέρομαι στο Σχέδιο για Έναν Νέο Αμερικανικό Αιώνα (Project for a New American Century- PNAC), την ομάδα νεοσυντηρητικών διανοούμενων που υποστήριξαν τον Μπους ΙΙ και πίστευαν ότι είχαν το στρατηγικό σχέδιο για την αναζωογόνηση των ΗΠΑ ως αδιαμφισβήτητο ηγέτη του κόσμου. Η ειρωνεία είναι ότι κανένας άλλος παίκτης δεν έχει κάνει περισσότερα από τις ΗΠΑ για να υπονομεύσει την ηγεμονία των ΗΠΑ.

Η εξωτερική και οικονομική πολιτική που υποστηρίχθηκε από τον Μπους ΙΙ και συνεχίστηκε με κάποιους τρόπους από τον Τραμπ και άλλους τρόπους από τον Μπάιντεν, πιθανόν έχει καταστρέψει οποιαδήποτε πιθανότητα έχουν οι ΗΠΑ να αποκαταστήσουν την παγκόσμια αρχιτεκτονική που καθιέρωσαν μετά την νίκη τους επί των Ναζί.

Το γεγονός ότι κανένας στην αμερικανική ή βρετανική πολιτική ελίτ δεν φαίνεται να κατανοεί αυτό το γεγονός, απλά το επιβεβαιώνει. Και παρόλο που το επίπεδο της αυτοκαταστροφικής άγνοιας είναι εκπληκτικό, δεν πρέπει να προκαλεί έκπληξη, καθώς οι καπιταλιστές συνήθως κατανοούν τον καπιταλισμό σε επιφανειακό επίπεδο, όπως και οι κρατιστές κατανοούν το Κράτος σε επιφανειακό επίπεδο, παρόμοια με τους σχολιαστές αθλητικών που αναλύουν κυρίως τις φάσεις των πιο πρόσφατων αγώνων.

Όταν οι ΗΠΑ ήταν στην στιγμή της μεγαλύτερης ισχύος τους, στα τέλη της δεκαετίας του ’80 και στη δεκαετία του ’90, αμέσως μετά τη νίκη τους στον Ψυχρό Πόλεμο, η υπεροψία του νεοσυντηρητικού κινήματος στην πολιτική τάξη και η ανεξέλεγκτη απληστία της νεοφιλελεύθερης τεχνοκρατίας μεταξύ των χρηματοπιστωτικών ιδρυμάτων, κατέστρεψαν άμεσα τη βάση της ηγεμονίας των ΗΠΑ.

Το ΔΝΤ, οι G7, και όλο το τσίρκο των ανθρωπιστικών ΜΚΟ και διεθνών επενδυτών επωφελήθηκαν κατάφωρα από τη διαφθορά, τα αυταρχικά καθεστώτα και τους εμφύλιους πολέμους σε πρόσφατα αποαποικιοποιημένες χώρες. Αυτό που εννοούσαν όταν μίλαγαν για “ανάπτυξη” ήταν η απόλυτη εξάρτηση από ένα μόνο εξαγώγιμο προϊόν, έτσι ώστε κάθε φτωχή χώρα να μην είναι μόνο εντελώς ευάλωτη στην πολιτική πίεση από τις ΗΠΑ και την Ευρώπη, αλλά και να βυθίζεται στην πείνα ανάλογα με τις διακυμάνσεις της αγοράς συναλλάγματος. Μετά τη δεκαετία του ’70, αυτό που τους ενδιέφερε περισσότερο ήταν να βγάζουν κέρδη με κάθε τρόπο βασιζόμενοι σε καθαρή χρηματοοικονομική κερδοσκοπία παρά σε οποιαδήποτε παραγωγική ανάπτυξη που, από καπιταλιστική άποψη, θα μπορούσε να θεωρηθεί βιώσιμη. Με άλλα λόγια, όλη η πτέρυγα οπαδών του Λόρενς Σάμερς δεν έκρυβε το γεγονός ότι ήταν βρικόλακες που δεν πίστευαν καν το δικό τους δόγμα, ενώ η πλευρά των Ράμσφελντ και Μπόλτον αδυνατούσε να κρύψει την άγνοιά της για τον κόσμο, για την πολιτική και για τις χώρες στις οποίες πίστευαν ότι μπορούσαν να κυριαρχήσουν.

Η όλη ηγεμονία των ΗΠΑ στη παγκόσμια πολιτική σκηνή ήταν γενικότερα κατάφωρη.

Οι ΗΠΑ και το Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο θα μπορούσαν να είχαν αποδεχτεί περιστασιακές παραχωρήσεις, μη επιτυγχάνοντας πάντα τα επιθυμητά αποτελέσματα στις διεθνείς συγκρούσεις. Αυτό το θέατρο του «παίζοντας δίκαια» θα μπορούσε να είχε δημιουργήσει ευρεία πίστη και εξάρτηση από το πλαίσιο των Ηνωμένων Εθνών. Και αυτό θα είχε ενισχύσει τη δύναμη των ΗΠΑ μακροπρόθεσμα, αφού ο ΟΗΕ δημιουργήθηκε από τις ΗΠΑ και έχει την έδρα της παγκόσμιας πολιτικής στη Νέα Υόρκη. Αλλά αντίθετα, δεν κατανόησαν τη ηγεμονική και σχεσιακή φύση της εξουσίας και πίστευαν ότι η κατοχή μιας άνευ προηγουμένου ποσότητας ισχύος σήμαινε ότι μπορούσαν να δρουν μονομερώς χωρίς να υπονομεύσουν την ίδια τη βάση αυτής της ισχύος.

Αυτό θα ήταν σαν η Apple να είχε καταφέρει να χρησιμοποιούν όλοι στον κόσμο υπολογιστές Apple, αλλά να μην επέτρεπε στους ανθρώπους να παράγουν οτιδήποτε μέσα σε έναν υπολογιστή Apple που να κριτικάρει την Apple. Τι σημασία έχει αν μιλάς άσχημα για το Twitter X, αν το μόνο φόρουμ για να το κάνεις είναι το Twitter X;

Εισβάλλοντας αυθαίρετα στο Ιράκ δύο φορές και δολοφονώντας εκατομμύρια ανθρώπους, ανατρέποντας σοσιαλδημοκρατικά (αλλά καπιταλιστικά!) καθεστώτα επειδή αυτά δεν ευνοούσαν μια λίστα Δυτικών επενδυτών, προστατεύοντας το Ισραήλ από την οποιαδήποτε ελάχιστη επίπληξη μέχρι το σημείο όπου σχεδόν το σύνολο της ισραηλινής κοινωνίας να αισθάνεται πως έχει το δικαίωμα να διαπράττει γενοκτονία — όχι στα κρυφά, όπως μερικές φορές κάνουν οι ΗΠΑ, αλλά φανερά μπροστά στις κάμερες τηλεοπτικών καναλιών, χαμογελώντας και κάνοντας αστεία, με τις ίδιες τις ΗΠΑ να κρατούν τις κάμερες — οι ΗΠΑ και το Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο έχουν καταστρέψει την νομιμοποίηση και την λειτουργικότητα του ίδιου τους του πολιτικού εργαλείου. Οι ΗΠΑ (και υπό την προστασία τους, το Ισραήλ) αγνοούν κατάφωρα και αυθαίρετα τις αποφάσεις του ΟΗΕ. Δρουν σαν “κράτος-παρίας” μέσα στο διακρατικό σύστημα που οι ίδιες σχεδίασαν, αν και το σχεδίασαν προς όφελός τους. Και αυτή η καουμπόικη στάση πάντα χαρακτήριζε την εξωτερική πολιτική των ΗΠΑ (εκτός, ίσως, υπό τον Ρούζβελτ), αλλά επιταχύνθηκε υπό τον Ρέιγκαν και ειδικά τον Μπους ΙΙ.

Ο Τραμπ μιμήθηκε αυτή την αλαζονεία με αρκετές μονομερείς κινήσεις, ενισχύοντας για παράδειγμα την εν λευκώ υποστήριξη προς το Ισραήλ, και αποσυρόμενος από το ίδιο το ζήτημα της στρατηγικής με μια τάση μη-επέμβασης που άφησε τους κύριους συμμάχους των ΗΠΑ ξεκρέμαστους. Η διοίκηση του Μπάιντεν εντωμεταξύ, προσπαθεί να κάνει επανεκκίνηση της στρατηγικής σκέψης, αλλά ενεργεί σαν να βρισκόμαστε στο 1996.

Το Ισραήλ ήταν κάποτε ένα σημαντικό στρατιωτικό εργαστήριο για τις ΗΠΑ και μια πυρηνική επιλογή στην κύρια περιοχή πετρελαϊκής παραγωγής του κόσμου, σε μια εποχή που μια παναραβική συμμαχία απειλούσε με τον έλεγχο τόσο του πετρελαίου όσο και της διώρυγας του Σουέζ. Τώρα, το Ισραήλ είναι σε μεγάλο βαθμό ένα βαρίδιο. Η Σαουδική Αραβία, η Τουρκία και το Ιράν προσπαθούν να ξανασχεδιάσουν τις γραμμές εξουσίας στη Δυτική Ασία με επιθετικό τρόπο και κανένας από αυτούς δεν βασίζεται αποκλειστικά στις ΗΠΑ για την προστασία τους. Η Υεμένη απειλεί ουσιαστικά τη ναυσιπλοΐα μέσω της διώρυγας του Σουέζ και το μεγαλύτερο μέρος του πετρελαίου της Δυτικής Ασίας εξάγεται προς την Ινδία και τις οικονομίες της Ανατολικής Ασίας, κυρίως την Κίνα.

Καθώς το Ισραήλ συνεχίζει την κατάφωρη γενοκτονία των Παλαιστινίων, ο ΟΗΕ αποδεικνύεται ανίκανος να παρέχει ακόμη και ανθρωπιστική βοήθεια και σχεδόν αγνοείται ως δυνητικός διαμεσολαβητής. Οι μόνοι παίκτες που μπορούν να απειλήσουν πραγματικά το Ισραήλ είναι η Χεζμπολάχ, οι Χούθι και οι ένοπλες πολιτοφυλακές που συνδέονται με τους Φρουρούς της Επανάστασης. Ο κύριος παίκτης στη διαδικασία διαμεσολάβησης είναι το Κατάρ. Με άλλα λόγια, οι μόνοι παίκτες που κερδίζουν σε νομιμοποίηση και ισχύ είναι σύμμαχοι του Ιράν, το οποίο είναι η μόνη από τις τρεις περιφερειακές δυνάμεις με την οποία οι ΗΠΑ δεν έχουν καμία σχέση επιρροής ή συμμαχίας.

Εντωμεταξύ, οι ΗΠΑ υποσκάπτουν τη σχέση τους με τις ευρωπαϊκές κυβερνήσεις. Ο Τραμπ συγκεκριμένα έδειξε στην ΕΕ και στο ΝΑΤΟ ότι δεν μπορούν πλέον να θεωρούν τις ΗΠΑ αξιόπιστο εταίρο τους, και αυτό είναι ένα άμεσο αποτέλεσμα της δυσλειτουργίας της δημοκρατίας καθώς το παγκόσμιο σύστημα καταρρέει. Οι δημοκρατικοί μηχανισμοί εξακολουθούν να παρέχουν έναν σημαντικό μηχανισμό αποσυμπίεσης που μπορεί να καθησυχάζει και να ενσωματώνει τα κινήματα αντίστασης πριν αυτά γίνουν επαναστατικά. Αλλά στις ΗΠΑ, τη Βραζιλία, την Ουγγαρία, την Πολωνία και το Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο, οι εκλογικές νίκες των δεξιών λαϊκιστών έδειξαν ότι στην πραγματικότητα η δημοκρατία είναι επικίνδυνη για την εξουσία επειδή δεν είναι εντελώς προσχηματική. Μέχρι τώρα, οι εκλογικές υποσχέσεις ήταν όλες για τα σκουπίδια γιατί καμία νέα πολιτική διοίκηση δεν έθετε σε κίνδυνο τις υποκείμενες οικονομικές πολιτικές του νεοφιλελευθερισμού. Οι τεχνοκράτες δεν έπρεπε να ανησυχούν: η μηχανή τους θα συνέχιζε να λειτουργεί αδιάλειπτα.

Ακόμη και οι εκλογικές νίκες προοδευτικών κομμάτων στην Ελλάδα, τη Βραζιλία, την Αργεντινή και αλλού έδιναν στους καπιταλιστές να καταλάβουν ότι δεν έχουν κανένα λόγο να ανησυχούν. Και τα δημοκρατικά κράτη αποδείχθηκαν ικανά να διαλύσουν πραγματικά φασιστικά κινήματα όπως η Χρυσή Αυγή στην Ελλάδα, πριν αυτά αποδειχθούν πραγματική απειλή. Αλλά οι δεξιοί λευκοί λαϊκιστές όπως ο Τραμπ, ο Μπολσονάρο, ο Όρμπαν και ο Τζόνσον, όχι μόνο διέβρωσαν τη λειτουργικότητα της δημοκρατικής διακυβέρνησης, αλλά απείλησαν και τη σταθερότητα του τεχνοκρατικού status quo, τρομάζοντας τους επενδυτές που ζούσαν μέχρι τότε σε έναν παράδεισο φτιαγμένο μόνο για αυτούς, και έκαναν κομμάτια την υποτιθέμενη ανθεκτικότητα βασικών πολιτικών σχηματισμών όπως η Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση ή η συμμαχία ΗΠΑ-Ευρώπης.

Η Ευρώπη— έχοντας αποτελέσει για καιρό τον πολύτιμο φορέα πολιτιστικής και πολιτικής νομιμοποίησης, δεδομένης της λευκής υπεροχής στην καρδιά του παγκόσμιου συστήματος— έχει για πρώτη φορά εδώ και σχεδόν έναν αιώνα αναγκαστεί να διαχωρίσει τα συμφέροντά της, και αυτό φαίνεται ήδη σε μια εμφανώς διαφορετική προσέγγιση προς την Κίνα. Στις ΗΠΑ, η πολιτική ελίτ ήδη θεωρεί την Κίνα ισότιμο αντίπαλο για ένα νέο Ψυχρό Πόλεμο, ενώ στην Ευρώπη η Κίνα θεωρείται ως ένας εν μέρη αξιόπιστος στρατηγικός εταίρος. Αν δεν αλλάξει κάτι γρήγορα, οι ΗΠΑ θα υποβαθμιστούν στην ίδια κατάσταση.

Και χωρίς αξιόπιστη υποστήριξη από τις ΗΠΑ, η ΕΕ θα πρέπει να ετοιμαστεί για πόλεμο, για να μπορέσει να αποτρέψει τη Ρωσία από περαιτέρω εισβολές. Για να βρεθεί μια ισορροπία που η Ρωσία δεν θα ρισκάρει να διαταράξει, αυτό μπορεί να σημαίνει να εγκαταληφθεί η Ουκρανία σε έναν μόνιμο διαμελισμό.

Από την προοπτική της αμερικανικής ισχύος, τίποτα από αυτά δεν φαίνεται να είναι για καλό. Για να έχουν την οποιαδήποτε πιθανότητα να ανανεώσουν το παγκόσμιο σύστημα που δημιούργησαν, οι ΗΠΑ θα πρέπει να κάνουν φιλόδοξες κινήσεις για να εξιλεώσουν την κακή τους φήμη:

• να υποστηρίξουν την δημιουργία Παλαιστινιακού Κράτους και να διακόψουν επίσημα την υποστήριξη της τρέχουσας κυρίαρχης τάξης του Ισραήλ καταστρέφοντας με αυτόν τον τρόπο την ισραηλινή οικονομία
• να εξομαλύνουν τις σχέσεις με την Κίνα και το Ιράν, εξασφαλίζοντας όμως ευνοϊκές επενδυτικές και εμπορικές συμφωνίες με τα κατ’όνομα δημοκρατικά καθεστώτα όπως της Ινδίας, της Ταϊβάν και της Νότιας Κορέας
• να κάνουν μια πειστική, ουσιαστική πρόταση για αναδιάταξη των διεθνών επενδύσεων που να διαφέρει από τη μισθοφορική νομισματική πολιτική του ΔΝΤ, διασφαλίζοντας περισσότερη αυτονομία για τη “βιώσιμη ανάπτυξη”, που θα καθοδηγείται από τις τοπικές κυρίαρχες τάξεις των πρώην αποικιοκρατούμενων χωρών, κλπ.
• να παρουσιάσουν ένα πειστικό σχέδιο για μια παγκόσμια μετάβαση στη πράσινη ενέργεια που θα επιταχύνει το τρέχον κύμα κερδοφόρων επενδύσεων, εξόρυξης και παραγωγής, ενώ επίσης θα περιλαμβάνει ένα στοιχείο “παγκόσμιας δικαιοσύνης”που θα παρέχει ουσιαστικούς πόρους σε φτωχές χώρες για να συμμετάσχουν στη μετάβαση και να βελτιώσουν την οικονομική τους θέση

Και εσωτερικά:

• να υιοθετήσουν την κατάργηση των φυλακών για δεύτερη φορά (η πρώτη φορά ήταν το 1865^[1]) με την αποποινικοποίηση των ναρκωτικών, την κατάργηση της ποινής της κάθειρξης για όλους τους μη βίαιους παραβάτες και την επέκταση της χρήσης άοπλων περιπολικών γειτονιάς
• να θεσπίσει υγειονομική περίθαλψη για όλους

Η πιθανότητα να συμβούν αυτά φαίνεται ωστόσο ελάχιστη, δεδομένου του πόσο μικρή είναι η επίγνωση που έχει η σημερινή άρχουσα τάξη για όλους τους τρόπους με τους οποίους υπονομεύει η ίδια την εξουσία της.

Μοιάζουν να πιστεύουν ακόμα ότι η προβολή δύναμης είναι ο τρόπος για να παραμείνουν στην εξουσία. Αλλά κανείς δεν αμφισβητεί ότι οι ΗΠΑ έχουν τον ισχυρότερο στρατό στον κόσμο. Δεν χρειάζεται. Το μόνο που χρειάζεται να δείξουν οι αντίπαλοι είναι ότι ο στρατός των ΗΠΑ αδυνατεί να φέρει εις πέρας αυτά που επιθυμεί η άρχουσα τάξη. Αυτό αποδείχθηκε τόσο στο Αφγανιστάν όσο και στο αδιέξοδο του Ιράκ. Και τώρα οι ΗΠΑ κόβουν βόλτες πάνω κάτω στην Ερυθρά Θάλασσα και τη Μεσόγειο εκτοξεύοντας πυραύλους στην Υεμένη, τη Συρία και το Ιράκ, φουσκώνοντας το στήθος τους και δείχνοντας ότι αν με χτυπήσεις με ένα άχυρο θα σε χτυπήσω με ένα σφυρί, αλλά αυτό που πραγματικά δείχνουν είναι η αναποτελεσματικότητά τους, η προθυμία τους να προκαλέσουν αποσταθεροποίηση της περιοχής από καθαρή αλαζονεία, και η μόνιμη περιφρόνησή τους για τα κυριαρχικά δικαιώματα οποιασδήποτε άλλης χώρας, ακόμα και των συμμάχων τους.

Αυτό βλάπτει σοβαρά την πίστη στις ΗΠΑ ως τον εν δυνάμει παγκόσμιο ηγέτη, γιατί μία από τις βασικές αλλαγές από το βρετανικό παγκόσμιο σύστημα στο αμερικανικό ήταν η αποαποικιοποίηση, καθώς μετά τον Β’ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο οι ΗΠΑ προβλήθηκαν ως εγγυητές της ελευθερίας απέναντι τόσο σε δικτατορίες όσο και σε επιθετικά κράτη.

Η αμερικανική ισχύς ακυρώνεται από την πραγματικότητα. Για δύο χρόνια, η Ουκρανία πολεμά επί ίσοις όροις τη Ρωσία, τη δεύτερη ισχυρότερη στρατιωτική δύναμη στον κόσμο, καταστρέφοντας ρωσικά τανκς εκατομμυρίων δολαρίων με drones αξίας μερικών χιλιάδων δολαρίων. Οι Χούθι τώρα χρησιμοποιούν drones απειλώντας τη ναυσιπλοΐα σε μία από τις πιο σημαντικές εμπορικές υδάτινες οδούς της παγκόσμιας οικονομίας. Η αποτελεσματικότητα των αμερικανικών συστημάτων αντιπυραυλικής άμυνας αξίας δισεκατομμυρίων δολαρίων είναι απλώς μέτρια. Εν τω μεταξύ, οι αμερικανικές πυραυλικές επιθέσεις από βάσεις, πλοία και αεροπλάνα σε όλη την περιοχή είναι κάτι παρά πάνω από αναποτελεσματικές, επειδή ενισχύουν τους αντιπάλους και αναγκάζουν τις μη συμμαχικές χώρες να επανατοποθετήσουν τους εαυτούς τους σε απόσταση ασφαλείας από τις ΗΠΑ και το Ισραήλ.

Αντί να προβάλλουν ισχύ, οι ΗΠΑ χρειάζονται να προβάλλουν νοημοσύνη, δημιουργώντας λύσεις για τις πολλές κρίσεις που πλήττουν το παγκόσμιο σύστημα. Η σημερινή αμερικανική κυρίαρχη τάξη δεν βλέπει τα πραγματικά προβλήματα και δεν προτείνει καμία πραγματική λύση. Η πιθανότητα αλλαγής φρουράς που θα ωθήσει τις αμερικανικές και ευρωπαϊκές ελίτ σε μια πιο έξυπνη στάση είναι εξαιρετικά χαμηλή, κοιτώντας τον εκλογικό χάρτη.

Από τους Τραμπικούς, που ρίχνουν λάδι στη φωτιά στο εσωτερικό και στο εξωτερικό, μέχρι τους Μπάιντεν, που δοκιμάζουν τις ίδιες παλιές τεχνικές ελπίζοντας σε διαφορετικά αποτελέσματα, το πολιτικό κατεστημένο βρίσκεται σε πόλεμο με τον εαυτό του. Πολιτικοί, τεχνοκράτες και επενδυτές εκλαμβάνουν προτάσεις που είναι πραγματικά αναγκαίες για να σωθεί το τρέχον παγκόσμιο σύστημα σαν ένα παράξενο μείγμα προδοσίας, προοδευτικών ανοησιών και σοσιαλιστικής επανάστασης.

Ο δρόμος των BRICS

Σε αυτό το σημείο φαίνεται απίθανο ότι οι ΗΠΑ θα μπορούσαν να διασώσουν το σχέδιό τους για παγκόσμια κυριαρχία, αλλά μέχρι να εμφανιστεί ένας αποτελεσματικός νέος ηγέτης με μια πειστική νέα αρχιτεκτονική, αυτό σημαίνει ότι το τρέχον σύστημα θα συνεχίσει να υφίσταται, παρακμάζοντας όλο και περισσότερο με συγκρούσεις, πολέμους και ακόμη και νεοφασιστικά καθεστώτα σε ορισμένες περιοχές, μέχρι να συμβεί μια αποφασιστική αλλαγή προς τη μία ή την άλλη κατεύθυνση.

Στο δοκίμιο «Αναρχία στα Παγκόσμια Συστήματα», ο Alex Gorrion υποστηρίζει ότι ο επόμενος παγκόσμιος αρχιτέκτονας θα είναι πιθανώς η Κίνα ή ενδεχομένως η Ινδία.

Πριν εξετάσουμε αυτές τις πιθανότητες, ας ρίξουμε μια ματιά σε ένα χαρακτηριστικό του θεωρητικού πλαισίου που χρησιμοποιούμε, το παγκόσμιο σύστημα. Ο πιο σχετικός θεωρητικός είναι ο Τζιοβάνι Αρίγκι, ο οποίος συνδύαζε μια κατά κύριο λόγο υλιστική ανάλυση των παγκόσμιων οικονομικών ροών με μια κατά κύριο λόγο αναρχική ανάλυση της εξουσίας και του κοινωνικού σχεδιασμού υπό το σύγχρονο κράτος. Φυσικά δεν αποδίδει τα εύσημα στους αναρχικούς, αλλά είναι ακαδημαϊκός, οπότε αυτό είναι αναμενόμενο.

Στην πρώτη έκδοση του βιβλίου του ” Τα μονοπάτια του Κεφαλαίου”, που δημοσιεύθηκε το 1994, ο Αρίγκι κάνει αυτό το τολμηρό βήμα: μια πρόβλεψη. Και το παίρνει εντελώς λάθος, λέγοντας ότι η Ιαπωνία θα είναι ο αρχιτέκτονας και ηγέτης του επόμενου παγκόσμιου συστήματος. Σε μια μεταγενέστερη έκδοση του βιβλίου ωστόσο, κάνει το σωστό και αναγνωρίζει ότι έκανε λάθος και ότι πιθανότατα η ηγέτιδα δύναμη του μέλλοντος θα είναι η Κίνα. Ωστόσο, δεν προσφέρει μια πειστική ανάλυση για το ποιο ελάττωμα της θεωρίας τον οδήγησε να κάνει αρχικά αυτό το λάθος.

Στο κείμενο «Αναρχία στα Παγκόσμια Συστήματα» υποστηρίζεται ότι το λάθος του Αρίγκι προκύπτει από την προτίμηση του προς την υλιστική πλευρά του δικού του θεωρητικού εργαλείου, έναντι της αναρχικής οπτικής. Η συσσώρευση κεφαλαίου δεν είναι η κινητήρια δύναμη του παγκόσμιου συστήματος. Είναι ένα αναγκαίο καύσιμο, αλλά η συσσώρευση κεφαλαίου δεν συμβαίνει χωρίς την αρχιτεκτονική και τον στρατηγικό σχεδιασμό των κρατών. Μπορούμε να συνειδητοποιήσουμε πόσο προφανές θα έπρεπε να είναι αυτό, αν αφήσουμε τους εαυτούς μας να δουν εκ των υστέρων το πόσο γελοία ήταν η πρόβλεψη ότι η Ιαπωνία θα ήταν η νούμερο ένα παγκόσμια δύναμη. Αυτή η πρόβλεψη βασιζόταν σε στατιστικά στοιχεία για την οικονομική ανάπτυξη της Ιαπωνίας, αφήνοντας έξω τον μη ποσοτικοποιήσιμο παράγοντα: τον στρατηγικό σχεδιασμό και τις διαμάχες εξουσίας των κρατών.

Η Ιαπωνία δεν θα μπορούσε να είναι ο επόμενος παγκόσμιος αρχιτέκτονας, διότι δεν είχε κερδίσει ποτέ έναν πόλεμο ενάντια στον παλιό ηγέτη, τις ΗΠΑ, και έτσι δεν είχε αποκτήσει κάποιο χώρο αυτονομίας μέσα στον οποίο θα μπορούσε να αρχίσει να κατασκευάζει έναν νέο σχεδιασμό. Μόλις η Ιαπωνία αμφισβήτησε τις ΗΠΑ— σε καθαρά οικονομικό επίπεδο— στη δεκαετία του ’80, οι Αμερικανοί σχεδιαστές απλώς έκοψαν την παροχή χρήματος. Μετά τον Πόλεμο της Κορέας όμως, η Κίνα είχε αυτή τη στρατιωτική νίκη έναντι των ΗΠΑ, και άρα έναν χώρο περιφερειακής αυτονομίας.

Θα μπορούσε λοιπόν η Κίνα να είναι ο αρχιτέκτονας του επόμενου παγκόσμιου συστήματος, και πώς θα μπορούσε αυτό να μοιάζει;

Για αρχή, η Κίνα δεν φαίνεται να έχει τη στρατιωτική δύναμη που απολάμβαναν οι προηγούμενοι αρχιτέκτονες του παγκόσμιου συστήματος. Τον 18ο και 19ο αιώνα, οι Βρετανοί είχαν τον πιο ισχυρό στόλο του κόσμου, πράγμα που τους έδινε παγκόσμια στρατιωτική εμβέλεια. Στο τέλος του Β’ Παγκοσμίου Πολέμου οι ΗΠΑ είχαν τον πιο αποτελεσματικό στρατό, τον μεγαλύτερο στόλο αεροπλανοφόρων, πυρηνικές βόμβες, βομβαρδιστικά μεγάλων αποστάσεων, και στρατιωτικές βάσεις με διαδρόμους προσγείωσης αρκετά μεγάλους για αυτά τα βομβαρδιστικά, σε όλο τον κόσμο.

Σήμερα, η Κίνα κατέχει προηγμένη τεχνολογία, αλλά μόλις πρόσφατα απέκτησε έναν στόλο ανοιχτής θάλασσας και πολύ πιο πρόσφατα επεκτάθηκε σε διαπλανητικό επίπεδο, στήνοντας τις πρώτες στρατιωτικές βάσεις στην ανατολική Αφρική. Ωστόσο, αυτή η διάκριση μπορεί να μην είναι τόσο σημαντική όσο ήταν στο παρελθόν.

Δεν υπάρχει κράτος που η κινεζική κυβέρνηση θα πρέπει να ανατρέψει ή να κατακτήσει για να πάρει τη θέση του ως παγκόσμιος αρχιτέκτονας (η Ταϊβάν μοιάζει να είναι αυτό το κράτος, αν και για λόγους πολύ πιο σχετικούς με την ιδεολογία της Κινεζικής άρχουσας τάξης παρά με την θέση της Κίνας στην παγκόσμια σκηνή· η Ταϊβάν, στην πραγματικότητα, θα μπορούσε να γίνει το Ισραήλ της Κίνας). Στο τρέχον σύστημα, ο ανοιχτός πόλεμος έχει δείξει φθίνουσες αποδόσεις. Καμία μεγάλη δύναμη δεν έχει συγκρουστεί ανοιχτά από το 1945 και όλες οι μεγάλες επεμβάσεις των δύο παγκόσμιων δυνάμεων (Βιετνάμ για τις ΗΠΑ και τους Σοβιετικούς, Αφγανιστάν για τους Σοβιετικούς, Αφγανιστάν και Ιράκ για τις ΗΠΑ) τους κόστισαν τελικά περισσότερα από όσα κέρδισαν.

Η μόνη στρατιωτική ικανότητα που πιθανώς θα χρειαζόταν η Κίνα για να αναλάβει τον ρόλο του παγκόσμιου ηγέτη είναι η επιχειρησιακή ικανότητα για αποτροπή και σταθεροποίηση. Αποτροπή σημαίνει απλώς ότι η Κίνα θα αποτελεί στρατιωτική απειλή αρκετά ισχυρή ώστε κανένα άλλο κράτος να μην τολμά να της επιτεθεί ανοιχτά σε αυτήν ή στα μικρότερα κράτη που η ίδια θεωρεί ως την κύρια ζώνη επιρροής της. Οι επιχειρήσεις σταθεροποίησης θα απαιτούσαν από την Κίνα να προβάλει τη δύναμη της διεθνώς για να προστατεύσει τη ροή του εμπορίου και τις μεγάλες επενδύσεις. Οι βάσεις της στην Ανατολική Αφρική είναι καλά τοποθετημένες για να βοηθήσουν στην αστυνόμευση των διαδρομών προς την Ερυθρά Θάλασσα και τη Διώρυγα του Σουέζ μέσω των οποίων ρέει μεγάλο μέρος του εμπορίου μεταξύ Ευρώπης και Ασίας.

Ωστόσο, αν προχωρήσουμε αυτή την ανάλυση περαιτέρω, θα ήταν λάθος να υποθέσουμε ότι απαιτείται ένα μόνο κράτος να είναι η μοναδική στρατιωτική και οικονομική υπερδύναμη για να ξεκινήσει ένα νέο παγκόσμιο σύστημα. Από τη Βεστφαλιανή κυριαρχία^[2] μέχρι τα Ηνωμένα Έθνη, όλα τα προηγούμενα παγκόσμια συστήματα βασίζονταν σε μεγάλο βαθμό στη συνεργασία (μεταξύ των εθνών-κρατών) και αν όχι στη συναίνεση, τότε τουλάχιστον στη συγκατάθεση.

Αυτό μπορούμε να το δούμε πιο καθαρά με τις χώρες του συνασπισμού BRICS, ένα σχήμα που προδιαγράφει καλύτερα ένα πιθανό νέο παγκόσμιο σύστημα. Οι BRICS, μαζί με την Νέα Αναπτυξιακή Τράπεζα και άλλους συνδεδεμένους θεσμούς, αποτελούν έναν αντίβαρο στο G7 και το ΔΝΤ. Πρόκειται για τις υπερδυνάμεις του λεγόμενου αναπτυσσόμενου κόσμου: Βραζιλία, Ρωσία, Ινδία και Κίνα όταν ξεκίνησε το 2009, με τη Νότια Αφρική να προστίθεται έναν χρόνο αργότερα. Στην αρχή αυτού του έτους εντάχθηκαν η Αίγυπτος, η Αιθιοπία, το Ιράν και τα Ηνωμένα Αραβικά Εμιράτα.

Σαφώς, οι BRICS επιτυγχάνουν σημαντική ανάπτυξη με τις αρχικές πέντε χώρες να αποτελούν το 45% του παγκόσμιου πληθυσμού και το 33% του παγκόσμιου ΑΕΠ (ή 27% αν δεν προσαρμοστεί σύμφωνα με την αγοραστική δύναμη). Αυτά σε σύγκριση με το ΝΑΤΟ (το οποίο είναι στρατιωτική συμμαχία και όχι οικονομική όπως οι BRICS), με 31 μέλη που αντιπροσωπεύουν το 55% των παγκόσμιων στρατιωτικών δαπανών, το 12% του παγκόσμιου πληθυσμού και πάνω από το ένα τρίτο του παγκόσμιου ΑΕΠ.

Εντωμεταξύ, η Νέα Αναπτυξιακή Τράπεζα με έδρα τη Σαγκάη, έχει συνολικά κεφάλαια 100 δισεκατομμυρίων δολαρίων, με 34 δισεκατομμύρια δολάρια σε εγκεκριμένα δάνεια ετησίως. Αυτό είναι πολύ λιγότερο από τα 932 δισεκατομμύρια δολάρια που αποτελούν τους συνολικούς πόρους του ΔΝΤ, αλλά δεν είναι και αμελητέο ποσό.

Τόσο ο ΟΗΕ όσο και το ΔΝΤ ιδρύθηκαν στις ΗΠΑ (με την πρώτη Γενική Συνέλευση του ΟΗΕ να συγκαλείται στο Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο, τον στενότερο σύμμαχο των ΗΠΑ). Ο κύριος αντίπαλος των ΗΠΑ, η ΕΣΣΔ, συμπεριλήφθηκε στον ΟΗΕ μιας και ο σκοπός του ήταν να αποτελεί ένα παγκόσμιο οργανισμό που να περιλαμβάνει όλα τα σύγχρονα κράτη, αλλά οι ΗΠΑ χρησιμοποίησαν τον ΟΗΕ συστηματικά για να περιορίσουν τους αντιπάλους τους, ή τον αποδυνάμωσαν όταν δεν μπορούσαν να επιβληθούν. Και αρχικά η ΕΣΣΔ δεν συμπεριλήφθηκε στο ΔΝΤ και σε παρόμοιους χρηματοπιστωτικούς θεσμούς, αν και με την πάροδο του χρόνου προσκλήθηκε και ενσωματώθηκε. Με άλλα λόγια, το σύστημα των ΗΠΑ υποστήριζε ότι είναι παγκόσμιο αλλά το έκανε με τρόπους που ωφελούσαν διακριτικά τις ΗΠΑ και τους συμμάχους τους.

Οι BRICS, από την άλλη πλευρά, ακολουθούν μια διαφορετική στρατηγική. Η συμμαχία δίνει στον εαυτό της τη δυνατότητα να είναι αντιηγεμονική, χωρίς να προσποιείται ότι είναι παγκόσμια. Είναι πολύ ξεκάθαρα ένα αντίβαρο στους κυρίαρχους οικονομικούς θεσμούς και συμμαχίες (το G7 και το ΔΝΤ). Και όμως, προσφέρεται για πιο ουσιαστική συνεργασία. Ειδικά κατά την ίδρυσή της το 2009, η Κίνα αποτελούσε την οικονομική δύναμη της συμμαχίας. Η Κίνα έχει συνεχιζόμενες πολιτικές και οικονομικές αντιπαλότητες καθώς και συνοριακές διαφορές, τόσο με τη Ρωσία όσο και με την Ινδία. Και όμως, και οι δύο αυτές χώρες προσκλήθηκαν να αποτελέσουν την αρχική βάση και η ιδρυτική σύνοδος κορυφής πραγματοποιήθηκε όχι στην Κίνα αλλά στη Ρωσία (αν και όχι χωρίς σημασία, στο Γεκατερίνμπουργκ, που βρίσκεται στην Ασία).

Δεν υπάρχει τίποτα επαναστατικό στο σύστημα που σχεδιάζει η Κίνα. Είναι απολύτως μια συνέχεια του παγκόσμιου συστήματος του καπιταλισμού, που κυβερνά τον κόσμο με όλο και πιο σφιχτό έλεγχο από τον 16ο αιώνα. Ωστόσο, επιδεικνύει ορισμένες διαφορετικές οργανωτικές αρχές.

Στο σύστημα υπό την ηγεσία των ΗΠΑ, μπορούμε να εντοπίσουμε τις εξής αρχές.

Αποαποικιοποίηση των Εθνών: οι ΗΠΑ διαφοροποιήθηκαν από τη Μεγάλη Βρετανία, την μεγαλύτερη αποικιοκράτική δύναμη στην παγκόσμια ιστορία, υποστηρίζοντας την “αποαποικιοποίηση”… μέσα σε ένα συγκεκριμένο πλαίσιο. Κάθε έθνος-κράτος θα πρέπει να έχει μια κυβέρνηση κατά τα δυτικά πρότυπα, αλλά οι αποικισμένοι πληθυσμοί δεν επιτρέπεται να αυτοκαθοριστούν. Τα σύνορα συνήθως σχεδιάστηκαν από τους πρώην αποικιοκράτες και η ανεξαρτησία θα δινόταν μόνο όταν οι πρώην αποικιοκράτες και οι ΗΠΑ αποφάσιζαν ότι μια νέα (τοπική) άρχουσα τάξη ήταν έτοιμη να αναλάβει την εξουσία. Έτσι, οι περισσότερες καταπιεστικές δυναμικές εξουσίας της αποικιακής εποχής επιβίωσαν μετέπειτα στην εποχή της αποαποικιοποίησης.

Νεοφιλελευθερισμός: η Διεθνής Νομισματική Τράπεζα και ο Παγκόσμιος Οργανισμός Εμπορίου ώθησαν τις παγκόσμιες οικονομίες μακριά από τον προστατευτισμό και προς την απελευθέρωση της νομισματικής πολιτικής έτσι ώστε, θεωρητικά, οι καπιταλιστές οπουδήποτε στον κόσμο να μπορούν να επενδύσουν οπουδήποτε το επιθυμούν. Η έννοια της «ελεύθερης αγοράς» ήταν καθαρή μυθολογία, καθώς οι μεγάλες επενδύσεις σε φτωχότερες χώρες τείνουν να έχουν μονοπωλιακά χαρακτηριστικά και οι ισχυρές χώρες μπορούσαν να καταστρέψουν τα νομίσματα των λιγότερο ισχυρών χωρών. Επιπλέον, οι επενδύσεις σε πρώην αποικισμένες χώρες τείνουν να επιτυγχάνουν κέρδη με καθαρά κερδοσκοπικό, χρηματοοικονομικό τρόπο ή/και ενισχύοντας οικονομίες εξαγωγών/εξορύξεων/φυτειών.

Δημοκρατία και Ανθρώπινα Δικαιώματα: οι ΗΠΑ προώθησαν την καθολική δημοκρατία με εγγυήσεις για τα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα. Ωστόσο, από όλες τις οργανωτικές αρχές αυτές αποδείχθηκαν οι πιο ατελείς. Οι επενδυτές συχνά διαπίστωναν ότι ήταν πιο βολικό να συνεργάζονται με δικτατορίες, ειδικά όταν ο στόχος τους ήταν το γρήγορο κέρδος ή η κατασκευή εξαιρετικά καταστροφικών μεγάλων έργων. Και οι ΗΠΑ, η Βρετανία, η Γαλλία, η Ολλανδία και η Βελγική πολιτική ελίτ ήταν πολύ ζηλότυπες με την εξουσία τους για να επιτρέψουν ελεύθερες εκλογές, όταν αυτό σήμαινε ότι μια τοπική κυβέρνηση θα κέρδιζε σε δύναμη και θα την έκανε την χώρα λιγότερο υπάκουη, ή όταν η νέα κυβέρνηση δεν ευνοούσε τους ενδεδειγμένους επενδυτές. Ως εκ τούτου, αυτά τα κράτη του ΝΑΤΟ ιδίως, εμπλέκονταν σε πραξικοπήματα και υποστήριζαν δικτατορίες σε όλο τον κόσμο, στην «πίσω αυλή της Αμερικής» ή στις πρώην αποικίες σε όλη την Αφρική και την Ασία, αντίστοιχα. Όσο για τα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα, αποδείχθηκε ότι ήταν μια έννοια σε μεγάλο βαθμό χωρίς περιεχόμενο στις ιεραρχικές κοινωνίες που παράγουν τεράστιες ανισότητες.

Θα χρειαζόμασταν εδώ μια καλύτερη ανάλυση, αλλά πιστεύω ότι οι οργανωτικές αρχές που προωθεί η Κίνα μπορούν να συνοψιστούν ως εξής:

Κρατική Κυριαρχία: αν και η Κίνα ασκεί σε μεγάλο βαθμό πολιτικές εθνοκάθαρσης και θα πρέπει να χαρακτηριστεί ως κράτος εποικισμού σε τουλάχιστον τα μισά από τα εδάφη που την απαρτίζουν, και ο ίδιος ο Σι θα μπορούσε να περιγραφεί ακριβέστερα ως ένας βαθιά εθνικιστής σοσιαλιστής, η Κίνα δεν δίνει έμφαση στο έθνος-κράτος ως οργανωτική αρχή σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο. Πολύ πιο σημαντική αρχή αποτελεί η κρατική κυριαρχία: εντός των συνόρων του, το κάθε κράτος έχει τη νομιμοποίηση να κάνει ό,τι θέλει. Μπορεί να επιβάλει εθνική ομοιογένεια, μπορεί να καταργήσει τις ιδέες περί έθνους εντελώς. Το τι κάνει είναι δική του δουλειά και κανενός άλλου. Υποθετικά, διαφωνίες γύρω από τα υπάρχοντα σύνορα μεταξύ κυρίαρχων κρατών θα πρέπει να επιλύονται μέσω διμερούς διπλωματίας. Επίσης υποθετικά, καθώς θα αυξάνεται η στρατιωτική ισχύς, η Κινεζική άρχουσα τάξη θα υποστηρίζει πραξικοπήματα και αλλαγές καθεστώτος σε ασθενέστερες χώρες σε όλη την Ασία, την Ωκεανία, τη Λατινική Αμερική και την Αφρική, αλλά θα χρειάζεται να βρίσκει έναν αποτελεσματικό τρόπο διακυβέρνησης ή δικαιολόγησης αυτών των έκτακτων ενεργειών.

Επενδύσεις σε υποδομές: η Κίνα θα συνεχίσει να υποστηρίζει το παγκόσμιο ελεύθερο εμπόριο, ισορροπώντας ως συνήθως μεταξύ της παροχής στρατηγικής υποστήριξης σε σημαντικές εγχώριες εταιρείες και της διασφάλισης της δυνατότητας για τις κυβερνήσεις να προσελκύουν επενδύσεις από οπουδήποτε στον κόσμο, το δικαίωμα των επενδυτών να επενδύουν οπουδήποτε στον κόσμο. Αλλά σε αντίθεση με την έμφαση στο καθαρό κέρδος, όπως στο αμερικανικό σύστημα, μπορεί να υπάρξει μια πραγματική στροφή προς την προώθηση της βιώσιμης οικονομικής ανάπτυξης, που επιτυγχάνεται αρχικά μέσω μεγάλων έργων «βελτίωσης» των υποδομών στις μετα-αποικιακές χώρες. Με άλλα λόγια, η Κίνα -και η Ινδία και η Βραζιλία- πιθανότατα θα επιδιώξουν να επιτύχουν μια επέκταση της πραγματικής παραγωγής, όχι μόνο της εγχώριας αλλά σε όλο τον κόσμο.

Ποιότητα ζωής: Δεδομένου του τεχνοκρατικού υποβάθρου της, η Κινεζική άρχουσα τάξη είναι πιθανό να προκρίνει την έμφαση στην ποιότητα ζωής έναντι των ανθρωπίνων δικαιωμάτων. Η ποιότητα ζωής, σύμφωνα με τη θρησκεία του καπιταλισμού, είναι κάτι που μπορεί να μετρηθεί ποσοτικά, σε αντίθεση με τα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα. Και η προώθηση αυτής της αντίληψης της ποιότητας ζωής συνάδει με την αυξημένη επένδυση στην ανάπτυξη των υποδομών, ενώ η έννοια των ανθρωπίνων δικαιωμάτων ενθαρρύνει παραβιάσεις της κυριαρχίας άλλων κρατών. Τα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα είναι ένα υπόλειμμα του πατερναλισμού των αποικιοκρατικών, χριστιανικών χωρών που χρειάζονται να βεβαιωθούν ότι οι αποικιοκρατούμενοι λαοί έχουν μάθει να απαγγέλουν τα κατάλληλα δόγματα πριν μπορέσουν να τους εμπιστευθούν την ανεξαρτησία τους. Η ποιότητα ζωής, ωστόσο, μπορεί να αποτελέσει ένα κοινό σημείο μεταξύ διπλωματών που εργάζονται για μια πολιτική τάξη η οποία βασίζεται στην απόλυτη κρατική κυριαρχία και τεχνοκρατών- επενδυτών που επιδιώκουν την οικονομική ανάπτυξη μέσω επενδύσεων σε υποδομές. Η υπόσχεση για υψηλότερη ποιότητα ζωής μπορεί επίσης να αποτελέσει μια αποτελεσματική στρατηγική για τον κατευνασμό πιθανών απειλητικών λαϊκών κινημάτων.

Τόσο το παράδειγμα όσο και οι πόροι που προσφέρουν οι BRICS αποδεικνύονται ελκυστικά. Μόνο φέτος, το Ιράν ήταν μία από τις πολλές νέες χώρες που εντάχθηκαν στις BRICS, παρά τις προσπάθειες των ΗΠΑ να απομονώσουν την Τεχεράνη.

Πώς θα έμοιαζε το σημείο καμπής, που θα προαναγγέλλει την αρχή ενός νέου παγκόσμιου συστήματος;

Οι BRICS δεν θα ήταν απαραίτητα το όχημα για το νέο παγκόσμιο σύστημα, ειδικά επειδή η συμμαχία σχεδιάστηκε ως ένα οικονομικό και πολιτικό αντίβαρο μέσα στο τρέχον παγκόσμιο σύστημα. Αλλά, παρόμοια με τη σχέση μεταξύ της Κοινωνίας των Εθνών και των Ηνωμένων Εθνών, δίνει μια καλή ένδειξη για το πώς θα έμοιαζε το νέο σύστημα.

Θα μπορούσε εύκολα να ξεκινήσει ως συμμαχία ή κάποιου είδους συνθήκη, μετά από μια παγκόσμια ύφεση και την εξάπλωση ενός ή δύο περιφερειακών πολέμων. Η συνθήκη ή η συμμαχία θα μπορούσε να μίλαγε μια γλώσσα που να αναφέρεται στον σεβασμό των συνόρων και της εσωτερικής κυριαρχίας των κρατών και στη δέσμευση για διαμεσολάβηση αντί του πολέμου. Θα μπορούσε να παρουσιαστεί ως ένα win-win (αντί για το αρνητικό άθροισμα του ανοιχτού πολέμου) εάν ήταν η επέκταση μιας ήδη υπάρχουσας, επιτυχημένης συμμαχίας μεταξύ οικονομικών μεγάλων δυνάμεων. Αυτή η συμμαχία θα έστελνε ανοιχτή πρόσκληση σε όλες τις άλλες χώρες, απαιτώντας μια ανανέωση της δέσμευσης για ελεύθερο εμπόριο, ενώ θα ανακοίνωνε μεγάλες επενδύσεις ως κίνητρο. Αντί για τον επιθετικό δανεισμό του ΔΝΤ, αυτές οι επενδύσεις θα σχεδιάζονταν φαινομενικά για τον εκσυγχρονισμό των υποδομών σε όλο τον κόσμο και την αύξηση της ποιότητας ζωής.

Οι αρχικοί υπογράφοντες αυτής της συμμαχίας θα πρέπει πιθανώς να περιλαμβάνουν την Κίνα, την Ινδία, τη Βραζιλία, τη Νότια Αφρική, την Ινδονησία, την Αίγυπτο, ίσως την Αργεντινή και τη Σαουδική Αραβία, και— κρίσιμα— την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση, ή τουλάχιστον τη Γερμανία και τη Γαλλία. Όπως σημειώθηκε, η ΕΕ έχει ήδη αρχίσει να απομακρύνεται από τις ΗΠΑ και να διατηρεί ανοιχτές προοπτικές για χτίσιμο καλών σχέσεων με την Κίνα.

Μια σημαντική αλλαγή που θα μπορούσε να γείρει την πλάστιγγα, θα ήταν μια πιθανή χρεωκοπία των ΗΠΑ σε μια μελλοντική ύφεση, ή το να εξακολουθήσουν οι ΗΠΑ τη αχαλίνωτη στρατιωτική επιθετικότητα σε όλο τον κόσμο, χωρίς μια αντίστοιχη δέσμευση προς τους ιστορικούς συμμάχους τους.

Η νέα συμμαχία θα ξεκινούσε αυτοβούλως μεταξύ μιας ομάδας χωρών, αλλά θα επεκτεινόταν παγκοσμίως και θα ξεπερνούσε γρήγορα τον ΟΗΕ και το ΔΝΤ σε νομιμοποίηση, λειτουργικότητα και πόρους.

Ποιες θα ήταν οι πρώτες εντάσεις που θα αντιμετώπιζε ένα τέτοιο παγκόσμιο σύστημα; Δεν τίθεται θέμα πως η Συμφωνία του Παρισιού ή ο ΟΗΕ έχουν οποιαδήποτε πραγματικά θετική επίδραση στην αντιμετώπιση της πλανητικής καταστροφής, αλλά η έμφαση των BRICS στη χρήση «κυρίαρχων πόρων» (ορυκτών καυσίμων) για τη χρηματοδότηση της ανάπτυξης και την πληρωμή μιας ενεργειακής μετάβασης αποκλείει άμεσα οποιεσδήποτε πραγματικές εναλλακτικές για τον πλανήτη. Αυτό σημαίνει ότι η επιταχυνόμενη και καταστροφική κλιματική αλλαγή θα είναι το σκηνικό του νέου παγκόσμιου συστήματος. Οι αλλαγές καιρού αποδεικνύονται πιο καταστροφικές για τις χώρες της εύκρατης ζώνης, αλλά αυτές είναι οι ίδιες χώρες που πρέπει να αναλάβουν το βάρος της εγκαινίασης ενός νέου παγκόσμιου συστήματος.

Οι Κινεζικές και Ινδικές επενδύσεις στην Αφρική πιθανότατα θα διατηρήσουν έναν απροκάλυπτα αποικιακό χαρακτήρα (περισσότερο, για παράδειγμα, από τις Βραζιλιάνικες επενδύσεις στη Λατινική Αμερική), εμποδίζοντας το νέο σύστημα να επωφεληθεί από τις αλλαγές βιτρίνας (ΣτΜ: change in branding στο πρωτότυπο) ή να αυξήσει την νομιμοποίηση του.

Οι αγώνες εξουσίας μεταξύ των πιο ισχυρών μελών της συμμαχίας θα μπορούσαν να αποδειχθούν αποσταθεροποιητικοί, ειδικά καθώς η Ινδία (μια δεξιά δημοκρατία) ξεπερνά την Κίνα σε οικονομική ανάπτυξη. Όπως έδειξε το κίνημα αντίστασης στο Χονγκ Κονγκ, η Κίνα, ως απολυταρχία, έχει λιγότερες επιλογές για την ενσωμάτωση της εξέγερσης. Στην ενδεχόμενη αδυναμία να καταστείλει ένα υπονομευτικό κίνημα με χρήση αστυνομικής βίας, η ηγεσία του ΚΚΚ θα μπορούσε να διασπαστεί και το σύστημα θα διαλυόταν.

Επίσης, οι δικτατορικές μορφές διακυβέρνησης σπάνια επιβιώνουν από ισχυρούς ηγέτες. Βέβαια, ο Σι δεν είναι δικτάτορας με τον τρόπο που ήταν ο Χίτλερ και ο Φράνκο. Υπάρχει ένας πολύ ισχυρός κομματικός μηχανισμός πίσω του και έχει εδραιώσει την εξουσία του στο Κόμμα την τελευταία δεκαετία.

Η Ινδία δεν θα διαλυθεί μετά τον Μόντι, αλλά η Ρωσία θα μπορούσε εύκολα να διαλυθεί μετά τον Πούτιν. Με την Κίνα, είναι δύσκολο να πει κανείς, επειδή οι προηγούμενες διοικήσεις του ΚΚΚ δεν είχαν την πολιτική ευστροφία του Σι, την ικανότητά του να κάνει επιθετικούς υπολογισμούς που να επικεντρώνονται στο πώς το κινεζικό κράτος θα μπορούσε να αυξήσει την ισχύ του χωρίς να αποδεχθεί καμία από τις διαθέσιμες επιλογές (π.χ. ούτε Μαοϊσμός, ούτε νέα Πολιτική Ανοικτών Θυρών).

Με άλλα λόγια, ο Σι και οι σύμβουλοί του έχουν τη δυνατότητα να λειτουργούν επινοητικά, ένα χαρακτηριστικό απαραίτητο για το σχεδιασμό ενός νέου παγκόσμιου συστήματος. Αλλά μέρος του συστήματος διακυβέρνησης του Σι έχει απαιτήσει μηδενική ανοχή σε οποιαδήποτε ανυπακοή ή διαφωνία, κάτι που θα δυσκολέψει σημαντικά μια αποτελεσματική διαδοχή όταν ο Σι δεν θα είναι πια παρών. Το κρίσιμο ερώτημα είναι, αν υπάρχει ο χώρος για διάλογο μακριά από τη δημοσιότητα στα ανώτερα και μεσαία επίπεδα του ΚΚΚ, προβάλλοντας δημοσίως συναίνεση και ενότητα; Ή η μέθοδος διακυβέρνησης του Σι δημιουργεί μια κουλτούρα υποτακτικών γραφειοκρατών που δεν μπορούν να αμφισβητήσουν μια κακή ιδέα; Αν ισχύει το δεύτερο, η Κίνα ίσως μπορέσει να βοηθήσει στην εκκίνηση ενός νέου παγκόσμιου συστήματος όσο ο Σι είναι επικεφαλής, αλλά μπορεί να μην παραμείνει το κυρίαρχο μέλος της κεντρικής συμμαχίας του συστήματος.

Μιλώντας για επανάσταση

Ειλικρινά, ο μόνος λόγος που αύξησα την πιθανότητα μιας επιτυχούς παγκόσμιας επανάστασης είναι επειδή τα παγκόσμια συστήματα εξουσίας αντιμετωπίζουν περισσότερες τριβές και γίνονται ανίκανα να προβάλουν τη σταθερότητα. Όχι επειδή γινόμαστε πιο δυνατοί.

Και ο κύριος λόγος που δεν γινόμαστε πιο δυνατοί από μόνοι μας, είναι επειδή έχουμε χάσει τη μνήμη και τη φαντασία μας.

Μέσα στην ένδεια βιωμάτων και την αλλοτρίωση που επιβάλλει ο καπιταλισμός, σπάνια γνωρίζουμε πώς να επιτύχουμε την οποιαδήποτε συνέχεια από τη μια γενιά στην άλλη, οπότε επαναλαμβάνουμε τα ίδια λάθη ξανά και ξανά. Και λειτουργώντας υπό την αποικιακή νοοτροπία του ορθολογισμού έχουμε ξεχάσει ότι ο πραγματικός κόσμος δεν μπορεί να υπάρξει χωρίς τους κόσμους της φαντασίας. Αφήνουμε τον καπιταλισμό να τα φαντάζεται όλα για εμάς κι έχει ατροφήσει η δική μας φαντασία, έτσι ώστε να μην μπορούμε πλέον να στραφούμε στην επανάσταση ως μια σημαντική, ουσιαστική έννοια- επειδή ελάχιστοι γνωρίζουν πλέον πώς να φανταστούν μια επανάσταση.

Μόλις ξεπεράσουμε τις πρώτες στιγμές της επανάστασης- όπου μπορούμε να στηριχτούμε αποκλειστικά στο πάθος, την αυθόρμητη νοημοσύνη και τις καινοτόμες τακτικές μας-, από εκεί και πέρα, δεν έχουμε φανταστεί ποια βήματα θα κάνουμε στη συνέχεια. Έτσι, δεν κάνουμε καθόλου βήματα. Είτε γινόμαστε παθητικοί, είτε εξαντλούμαστε, είτε προσπαθούμε να επαναλάβουμε τις ίδιες χορευτικές κινήσεις που μας έφεραν σε εκείνο το σημείο. Ή δοκιμάζουμε ένα αντίθετο σύνολο χορευτικών κινήσεων (που συνήθως μας οδηγεί σε πολύ χειρότερο σημείο).

Αυτό είναι κρίμα γιατί έχουμε τη μεγαλύτερη ευχέρεια να χτίσουμε μια επανάσταση σε μια στιγμή όπως αυτή, όταν ένα παγκόσμιο σύστημα καταρρέει, και πριν αναζωογονηθεί ή πριν το επόμενο σύστημα έχει την ευκαιρία να εκκινήσει πλήρως την αντικατάστασή του.

Για να μην σπαταλήσουμε τις ευκαιρίες μας, όμως, πρέπει να θυμηθούμε πολλά πράγματα:

• Η Δημοκρατία είναι ο εχθρός μας. Η υποστήριξη της Δημοκρατίας, μας μετατρέπει μόνο σε καινοτόμους σχεδιαστές για την αναζωογόνηση του αμερικανικού σχεδίου.
• Η Δεξιά και η Αριστερά είναι τα δύο χέρια του Κράτους, εξίσου επικίνδυνα. Η πραγματική γραμμή σύγκρουσης βρίσκεται ανάμεσα στους πάνω και στους κάτω. Ωστόσο, η Δεξιά και η Αριστερά δεν είναι το ίδιο. Οι ακόλουθοι της Αριστεράς είναι κυρίως ειλικρινείς. Πρέπει να είμαστε παρόντες για να βοηθούμε με την συμμετοχή μας να διαδοθούν ουσιαστικές μορφές εξέγερσης, και πρέπει να μπορούμε κάθε φορά να καταδείξουμε στους Αριστερούς ψηφοφόρους την αληθινή φύση των ηγετών τους. Όσον αφορά τη Δεξιά, πρέπει πάντα να επιτιθέμεθα στα ψέματα και τις παρανοϊκές ιδέες της. Το κλειδί είναι να αφήνουμε την πόρτα ανοιχτή για τους ακόλουθους της Δεξιάς ώστε αυτοί να έχουν την ευκαιρία να προδώσουν την εξουσία, αλλά ποτέ να μην ενστερνιζόμαστε τις ανησυχίες τους. Πρέπει να χτίζουμε δύναμη βασισμένη στην εκτεταμένη αλληλεγγύη για να τους δείχνουμε τον δικό μας τρόπο, αλλά θα πρέπει και οι ίδιοι να μπορούν να κάνουν το κατάλληλο βήμα και να εγκαταλείψουν τις κοινωνικές ταυτότητες που βασίζονται στην καταπίεση.
• Ο μαρξισμός πρόδωσε τα ισχυρότερα επαναστατικά κινήματα του 19ου και 20ού αιώνα. Δεν αξίζει άλλες ευκαιρίες. Οι πρωτοπορίες, τα εξουσιαστικά κόμματα και οι ρεφορμισμοί πρόδωσαν τα ισχυρότερα κοινωνικά κινήματα των τελευταίων 100 ετών. Δεν αξίζουν άλλες ευκαιρίες.
• Η κατάργηση των φυλακών συνέβη ήδη στο παρελθόν, αλλά επειδή έμεινε ανολοκλήρωτη, άλλαξε μόνο τον τρόπο λειτουργίας των ιδρυμάτων της καταπίεσης χωρίς να τερματίσει την ίδια την καταπίεση. Η ουσιαστική κατάργηση πρέπει να εντοπίσει τη κοινή ρίζα της εκμετάλλευσης και της λευκής υπεροχής (πολλοί από τους σημερινούς υποστηρικτές της κατάργησης των σχέσεων σύγχρονης δουλείας και εκμετάλλευσης (abolitionists) προετοιμάζουν ήδη το έδαφος για μια δεύτερη μεγάλη ήττα μας- μέσα στη δική τους “νίκη”).
• Η αποαποικιοποίηση συνέβη ήδη. Αλλά επειδή ήταν πολιτική και όχι κοινωνική, η αποικία ουσιαστικά εξαπλώθηκε, εκπαιδεύοντας τους αποικιοποιημένους να ενεργούν όπως οι αποικιοκράτες τους. Για να καταστρέψουμε την αποικιοκρατία, πρέπει να καταστρέψουμε τις ρίζες, τις αρχές και τις μεθόδους της- την προσαρμογή, την υποταγή και την αφομοίωση.
• Μια επανάσταση πρέπει να θεσμίσει την αλληλεγγύη μεταξύ όλων των ανθρώπων, αλλά οι άνθρωποι πρέπει να είναι ειλικρινείς για τις καταβολές και την καταγωγή τους. Οι άνθρωποι που φέρουν μέσα τους μια κουλτούρα μεσαίας τάξης πρέπει να την ξεμάθουν, να την αποκηρύξουν, καθώς αυτή εκδηλώνεται μέσω μιας πολιτικής μορφής προνομίων και ανέσεων: χτίζοντας άτυπη κοινωνική εξουσία, εξομαλύνοντας αντιθέσεις και αποφεύγοντας τη σύγκρουση. Αυτή τη στιγμή, υπάρχει μια σταυροφορία για να καταστραφούν οι πρακτικές της μετασχηματιστικής δικαιοσύνης – και οι δύσκολες εμπειρίες από τις οποίες προέρχονται αυτές οι πρακτικές – υπέρ εκείνων των ειδικών συμπεριφορών (ταυτόχρονα εύθραυστες και κακόβουλες) που ευδοκιμούν στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης.
• Η επανάσταση είναι ζήτημα οργάνωσης, αλλά σχεδόν όλοι όσοι το θέτουν με αυτόν τον τρόπο περιορίζονται ήδη σε μια αντεπαναστατική ιδέα της οργάνωσης.
• Υπάρχει ένας άλλος τρόπος οργάνωσης του εαυτού μας, σχεδιασμού της δράσης και στρατηγικών βημάτων. Και υπήρχε από πάντα.

Προσπαθώ να αναπτύξω αυτά τα επιχειρήματα στα γραπτά μου και θα εστιάσω εκεί στα μελλοντικά μου έργα.

https://petergelderloos.substack.com

Επίλογος

Επιπλέον, κάτι στο οποίο δεν μπορώ να συνεισφέρω και πολύ: οι Μαύροι και οι Ιθαγενείς αναρχικοί χρειάζονται περισσότερο χώρο και υποστήριξη. Για να είναι πραγματικά επιτυχημένη, οποιαδήποτε επαναστατική προσέγγιση πρέπει να είναι πλουραλιστική, να είναι αντι-αποικιακή και να κατανοεί τις ρίζες της καταπίεσης. Η συγκεκριμένη ιστορική γενεαλογία του αναρχισμού που κατάγεται από την Ευρώπη δεν είναι επαρκής, ούτε για εμάς που είμαστε παγιδευμένοι μέσα στη λευκή υπεροχή και σίγουρα ούτε για όλους τους υπόλοιπους.

Για περισσότερα σχετικά με αυτές τις κατευθύνσεις, δείτε:

Klee Benally, “No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred”

Modibo Kadalie, “Intimate Direct Democracy”

Zoe Samudzi και William C. Anderson, “As Black As Resistance”

William C. Anderson, “The Nation on No Map”

Τέλος, ένα άρθρο που δίνει τροφή για σκέψη και αλληλεγγύη τόσο προς τους Κούρδους όσο και προς τους Παλαιστινίους – δύο λαούς που αντιμετωπίζουν γενοκτονία – και μία πρόσκληση για διεθνισμό από τα κάτω και όχι για διεθνισμό που ευνοεί τον κρατικό παράγοντα:

Ozlem Goner, “Internationalism beyond the Geopolitics of States and Solidarity in ‘Complex’ Situations“

^[1] ΣτΜ: με την κατάργηση της δουλείας στις ΗΠΑ

^[2] ΣτΜ: Σε διπλωματικό επίπεδο, η Συνθήκη της Βεστφαλίας λειτούργησε ως εφαλτήριο μιας νέας δυναμικής στην πολιτική σκηνή της κεντρικής Ευρώπης, η μετέπειτα λεγόμενη Βεστφαλιανή κυριαρχία, δυναμική η οποία εστιάζει στη συνύπαρξη κυρίαρχων κρατών. Βάσει αυτού, οι όποιες εσωτερικές υποθέσεις ενός κράτους αφορούν το ίδιο το κράτος και συνεπώς οι παρεμβάσεις από τρίτους αποτελούν σφάλμα. Καθώς η ευρωπαϊκή πολιτική λογική εδραιώθηκε σε όλο τον κόσμο, τα Βεσταφαλιανά αυτά ιδεώδη, ειδικότερα δε η ιδέα του κυρίαρχου κράτους, αποτέλεσαν κεντρικό πυλώνα του διεθνούς δικαίου και της ανερχόμενης τάξης πραγμάτων. Πηγή: Wikipedia

ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΕΠΙΣΗΣ:

The post Αναρχική Επαναστατική Γεωπολιτική 2024- Peter Gelderloos appeared first on Void Network.

Breaking with his principal focus on Southeast Asia, in September of last year, he published his ninth book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. In it, he interrogates long-held beliefs about how early civilizations formed. The book also serves as a blistering critique of the supposed function of states as “civilizing” instruments. Scott, who is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, lives on a farm outside of New Haven, Connecticut, where he tends to his hens and Highland cattle.

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FRANCIS WADE: What first drew you to your field of inquiry — the question of how states develop, how they control their subjects, and how they are then resisted?

JAMES C. SCOTT: Originally, this goes way back to my period as a graduate student and a Southeast Asianist when I was speaking against the Vietnam War. I was mesmerized by Sékou Touré, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and others, and it was only toward the end of the 1960s that I realized that all these kinds of revolutionary struggles led to a stronger state that was able to batten itself on the population in a more authoritarian way than the state that it replaced. My first book, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, was an effort to understand peasant rebellion. That led to subsequent works on forms of resistance that were not revolutionary — everyday forms of resistance. Most recently I’ve become interested in the deep history of the state, and a previous book relevant to that question was a history of the hill people in Southeast Asia. Against the Grain was a natural progression from this, but I wanted also to give an ecological side to this. Scholarly work is infused these days with a deep sense of doubt about the place we’ve gotten to, and how we’ve gotten there — whether it’s global warming or extinction of species. Just this morning I was thinking that all the studies on how animals think and reason, and how they are agents, provides an interesting angle for a species — ourselves — who think of themselves as a class apart in terms of our intelligence. At some deep level I share this worry that the state forms and ecology of agrarian life that prevailed until fossil fuels were used are partly responsible for some of the problems we now face. So I was determined to go back as far as I could to look at how this thing called the state and its concentration of animals and crops and people in sedentary spaces got established in the first place.

Some reviews of Against the Grain have accused it of going too hard on the state. Can the state be the provider of freedoms as much as it can limit them?

I try to think about this question carefully in terms of the French Revolution, because that was the first time that an entire, at least male, adult population was enfranchised. And it was the first time that anyone anywhere in France, no matter their estate or property or occupation, was equal before national French law. France after the revolution was a great emancipatory state, but prior to it, the state only had access to the population through the different parliaments and different estates of the feudal order. Once the revolution occurred, the state for the first time had direct access to every citizen. That was the birth of citizenship, and that made possible the total mobilization of the population under Napoleon. So you had organization and mobilization of total war and emancipation being linked integrally to the achievements of the French Revolution.

What I object to in some of the critical reviews of Against the Grain is that they seem to assume that hunters and gatherers had the option of either continuing with their existence or joining the Danish welfare state. They’re choosing, or more likely being forced to join, an agrarian autocracy of one kind or another. Insofar as the state has any welfare aspects, it’s only what is necessary to hold a population at the center that can be useful for them.

Weapons of the Weak explores the material and ideological ways in which elite power is resisted by society’s most vulnerable. Had you gone to this Malaysian village specifically to look at these tools of resistance?

Actually in some respects Weapons of the Weak is the book I’m proudest of, partly because it’s based on two years of fieldwork in this Malaysian village where nothing revolutionary was happening. And I found that it’s not just ideological, subtle ways of resistance that the villagers were using. Struggles for people with no citizenship rights, which is to say most of the world’s population most of the time, are always material in a sense. Between 1650 and 1850 the most popular crime in the United Kingdom was poaching. And there were never any great marches on London, no parliamentary petitions, no riots — this was a struggle over common property that went on for two centuries and yielded real benefits on a daily basis for the peasantry. Similarly, look at the difference between a land invasion on the one hand, and squatting: squatters don’t make any public claim; they’re interested in de facto results. The same is true for army desertions as opposed to mutiny, because mutiny makes a public claim. So it dawned on me that most resistance in history did not speak its name, and actually a lot of it was cloaked by an apparent loyalty to the king or the tsar. It seems to me that the historians, by paying attention to formal organization and public demonstrations, have missed most acts of resistance throughout history.

Are these everyday “weapons” used by the Malaysian villagers — foot-dragging, evasion, gossip — in use at home too, in a developed country like the United States with robust political institutions?

If we’re talking about developed countries, we’re talking about an overall alienation from politics and an unwillingness to give one’s heart and soul to struggle in an arena that one sees as deeply corrupted and compromised. That alienation and withdrawal are the most common forms of resistance. In Eastern Europe they used to call it internal migration — you’d find something else to think about because it was hopeless to think about the public sphere. It was Hobsbawm who said that the peasants’ goal is to work the system to their minimum disadvantage — they can’t beat it but they can nibble around the edges. The other thing I discovered in this Malaysian village is the way in which people misrepresent themselves before different audiences — how the poor misrepresent their agreements and complicity with the elite of the village, how they talk among themselves as opposed to how they talk to power. This is something that happens in daily life everywhere. When the disparities in power are great, the misrepresentation is correspondingly greater. These are the “hidden transcripts” I’ve written of.

But remember that foot-dragging is not just a skill of the powerless; it’s used by bureaucracies too. A long time back in Massachusetts the state government decided it wanted to reduce welfare expenditures. But it didn’t have the courage to do so openly, and it would’ve been too politically difficult to formally change the welfare criteria and welfare stipend. So what they did was to essentially make the bureaucratic process so onerous by using lengthy forms, to make the opening hours of the welfare office as inconvenient as possible for mothers with children — to use a whole series of subtle obstacles, or everyday resistance by elites, if you like, to make sure most people never made it to the candy store. So while that kind of resistance may be the only weapon of the powerless, it is one of the many weapons that elites have.

You’ve devoted entire books to exploring state resistance in Southeast Asia. But I often sense an almost conditioned desire among some communities there for strong authority, without which society might break apart. Thailand and the Philippines are two recent examples that come to mind.

I don’t claim to be a specialist on public opinion but it strikes me that the cosmopolitan, educated middles classes of Thailand have turned against a populist, elected government and are very happy to have military rule. Likewise, the fact that there’s not an uprising against Duterte in the Philippines is part of the same desire for law and order at the expense of democratic freedoms. In Myanmar, one of the military’s long-range goals, in terms of public opinion, is to make people fear the country will fall apart unless a strong military is confirmed in power and has a free hand. This desire is cultivated from the top. I have a feeling that Aung San Suu Kyi wanted to extend ceasefires to all the peripheral nationalities because she wanted that major issue of national security under control and I think the military was perfectly happy to have that break down and conflicts flare — it was in their interests to have it so.

Can these supposedly benevolent campaigns — ceasefires in Myanmar; Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines — instead be strategies to project state power into regions of these countries where it lacks?

Every state intervention and extension of power is seen by state elites as a benevolent move in the interest of the population. Even if the rationale is not cynical, it is still likely to result in an amplification of state power at the expense of its subjects. In the Philippines the effort to extend state power in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago is something that characterizes Philippine regimes back to President Magsaysay in the 1950s and the relocation of peasants into previously Islamic areas. So this effort to move what are seen to be friendly populations to the periphery of a state, among people who are seen as potentially hostile, happens all over Southeast Asia. You saw it with the transmigration efforts in Indonesia, and the efforts of the Vietnamese to move the Kinh majority ethnic group into the hills. This is something that is almost national policy. Some of it is stimulated and subsidized, some is voluntary.

Early states had to deal with a periphery of other peoples, with which they either had to make allies, or turn into mercenaries, or keep at arm’s length. Now, the population explosion of the last century and a half has meant there are land-starved lowland populations that can be used both to create plantations in the hills and new settlements and so on. In a sense the periphery can be controlled in large part through transplanting majority populations to the periphery. But now, modern technology and roads and transport allows the state to project its power in ways that weren’t previously possible. I think the degree to which the state has this control however varies a good deal across Southeast Asia. Most of Laos, for example, except for a few valley areas, is a non-state space.

Could there be something in the early processes of state formation there that accounts for this frequent pendulum swing between authoritarianism and democracy in Southeast Asia?

I guess if I were to address this question I’d want to look at World War II and postwar early independence history. In Myanmar in particular, it’s clear that military mobilization was an absolutely crucial part of the early creation of the Burmese state. Some of that is true in Indonesia too, and in spades in Vietnam. It seems that a lot of these places got a kind of muscle-bound military early on in the game that was accustomed to rule and in many cases to running the economy. They are the major economic interest as well. In that respect I think there’s an institutional military dominance that goes back a long way and the military then represents itself as the savior and soul of nation.

With that swing comes acute anxieties about the stability of society, and nationalist leaders are skilled at propagandizing on the fear that democracy will upend longstanding social orders, whether ethnic, religious, and so on. We’re seeing the lethal results of that in Myanmar right now.

If you ask which countries have the deepest and longest experience of open democratic politics in Southeast Asia, the answers would have to be the Philippines and Thailand, and Indonesia to some considerable extent now as well. The point is that a longer experience of relative stability under peaceful democratic political competition will reduce the fear that the nation will fall apart. I think of open democratic politics as a process of gradual education. On the other hand, if you have a continuous period of authoritarian rule then the only forms of opposition have to be deeply subversive or armed, and that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if the only kind of opposition that the Burmese military permits to its rule is armed secessionist movements. Then, in fact, the country will fall apart. It is, in a sense, a characteristic of politics that military rule has itself created.

On the question of Myanmar, this so-called pacted transition to democracy that Suu Kyi hopes to preside over raises a problem: the military has leased much of the natural resources to foreign companies, and they have grabbed lands and enterprises all over the country and deeded it to themselves and officers. It’s not clear to me, even if this transition were successful over the next eight years or so, that there would be a lot left that hadn’t been seized and made the property of the military or foreign companies with long leases. It’s turned out to be a bad bargain for the democrats.

You’re a longtime Myanmar watcher. Are you surprised at the intensification of ethno-religious violence there during democratization?

I have always remarked ever since I first went to Burma on what I thought as an irrational fear of Muslims in general. It’s a kind of hysteria — that these people are stealing our women, as if women are the property of Burmans [majority ethnic group] only. There’s a deep cultural fear of extinction, especially linked to males and Buddhism in its Burma guise, and it always seemed to be totally out of proportion to any real danger that the Burmese state faced.

There is no doubt that we have a massive humanitarian tragedy unfolding, the likes of which Southeast Asia has not seen at least since the massacres after 1965 in Indonesia. It seems to me that the Indonesians will be dealing with those massacres as a national stain for the next century, in the way that the Turks have to deal with the Armenian massacre. Whatever else one has to say about the Rohingya, they are human beings and they have been treated like cattle or worse — more than half a million have been driven away, their houses burned, their lives destroyed. When the dust settles, any Burmese regime is going to have to deal with this huge humanitarian tragedy for which the military and their allied militias will always be held responsible. This is one of those national stains. I’m not speaking from a positon of a nation that doesn’t have lots of genocides that it has to explain — the United States certainly does. But Burma has a genocide it needs to explain as well.

How does such a vast cross-section of a population come to rally in support of ethnic cleansing? It can’t just emerge from thin air.

I’m actually mystified by the deep suspicion and fears of Muslims that goes back long before the Rohingya crisis. I confess to not understanding this. There are all these links to the Indian population in Rangoon and dockworkers strikes and violence during the colonial period. There is a history there, but I am mystified by such a widespread fear of Muslims among ordinary Burmans, so I throw up my hands. But it’s been fanned and cultivated and whipped up by Buddhist nationalists who have their own particular agenda, and by Rakhine who have their own history and anxieties that are deeply rooted and realistic, and by the military, for whom all this helps to solidify their claims to power and control of the economy and state. These attitudes are there and they are deeply rooted but they have been politically mobilized like no one has ever seen. The Rohingya were quite passive historically but now they have become a point of public mobilization. Yet if one wanted to get upset about an “outside” economic threat in Myanmar then the Yunnan Chinese population, and the Chinese companies that control all of northern Burma, would be the source of a more realistic and palpable concern of economic domination than the Muslims have ever posed.

Is this perhaps a by-product of the creation of a new society — statecraft as pursued by a majority long denied the capacity to do so?

There are lots of groups in Southeast Asia that, like the Rohingya, spill over national boundaries. Outside of Southeast Asia, the Kurds are the most striking contemporary example. It seems to me that if you don’t want wars of secession then the only way to avoid them is for the international system to invent forms of association across borders on questions like culture, language, education, and so on — a whole series of issues that have to do with the cultural cohesion of a people that do not threaten the sovereignty of the nations across whose borders they spread. We need to invent something like that for the Kurds, the Rohingya, the Hmong, and lots of smaller ethnic groups.

The Burmese military could have gotten away with this assault on the Rohingya 30 years ago and the international press would have scarcely noticed. But the world is more closely integrated, such that every nation is going to have to answer for their treatment of helpless minority populations. The only thing that offers an even minor restraint on what is happening in Myanmar is this international scrutiny, and the more scrutiny the better. When it comes to the violation of essential human rights, there should be no place to hide.

¤

Francis Wade is a journalist and author of Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence And The Making Of A Muslim Other (Zed Books).

_____

source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/most-resistance-does-not-speak-its-name-an-interview-with-james-c-scott/

The post Most Resistance Does Not Speak Its Name: An Interview with James C. Scott appeared first on Void Network.

Jovenel Moïse, the corrupt US backed president of Haiti, is faced with a rapidly spreading insurrection. The population had resoundingly rejected his claim to authority by repudiating the voting process, rising up during the elections, and now fighting for the president’s immediate removal.

The people in Haiti have been in near constant revolt since colonization and slavery. Resisting the French, the Americans, and the Duvalier dictatorship, Haitians have resisted all forms of subjugation, colonial and indigenous. After the US kidnapping of popular president, Aristide, the Haitian political system has been generally unpopular and, ultimately, a client of the US government.

Moïse was “elected” under the shadow of rebellion. Each step he took closer to political power was met with widespread popular disdain. His party, the right wing Tèt Kale (PHTK), was renowned for its corruption and incompetence. Moïse declared, “I alone have the solution for the question of corruption,” while he assumed power under an indictment for money laundering. He put several new PHTK politicians in positions of power while they were suspected of financial transgressions.

Last summer, the government implemented an IMF austerity program that raised the price of gasoline, diesel, and kerosine to almost 50%. This draconian attack was met with fierce resistance.

As the resistance tapered off the scope of the capitalist attack on the poor became clear. The Venezuelan government established a fund called PetroCaribe that offered revenue for Haiti. The program was promoted as a program of “economic solidarity,” valued at $3.8 billion dollars. The fund was supposed to help restore the country after the hurricane, and generally increase the standard of living for the poor. This money, in actuality, was squandered and embezzled. The resistance to the state immediately intensified and has never subsided. What began as a movement against state corruption has now morphed into resistance against the president and his party. Militants are not articulating piecemeal demands but are calling for the overthrow of the ruling party.

On February 9th revolutionaries blocked the roads to the president’s home and stoned his property. Thousands of people poured into Port-au-Prince demanding the overthrow of the regime, and the state has begun killing protesters.

Anarchists, revolutionaries, and internationalists have a responsibility. When the poor is under assault, fighting to regain dignity, and overthrow right wing forces revolutionaries must move in tandem. As the US state is impulsively trying to organize a coup, and destroy the communal/revolutionary process in Venezuela it is also propping up a corrupt, far right government in Haiti that is directly looting the oil revenue that was gifted from Venezuela.

Revolutionaries have an opportunity to increase international connections, participate in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle, and combat the fascist momentum in the Americas.

Revolutionary action against Haitian state institutions is of utmost importance now, and small acts of solidarity can have a huge impact. The time to act is now!

source: Abolition Media Worldwide 

READ also

The Haitian Times

Mass Protests In Haiti, Like France’s Yellow Vests, Threaten Modern Oligarchic Structure

by Whitney Webb

MintPress News 

Haitian Authorities Arrest Americans Transporting Cache of Weapons amid Uprising

“President Jovenel Moise has brought home mercenaries to assassinate not only a desperate people who are clamoring for his resignation by demonstrating peacefully but especially his political opponents.” — Haitian online publication Vedeth

The post Haiti: Prelude to a Revolution-Mass Protests, Like in France, Threaten Modern Oligarchic Structure appeared first on Void Network.

Octavio Alberola, Revolución o colapso

What follows is an exercise in the sharing of ideas, of visions.  The most recent essay by the invisible committee, NOW, continues a reflection-intervention that began with The Coming Insurrection and To Our Friends, and offers a powerful critique of contemporary politics, along with a defense of “autonomy”.  What is proposed here then is a partial translation, summary, and occasionally a commentary and exemplification, or simply a montage, of some of the ideas that animate their vision of our times.

It also may be taken as a commentary on our recent posts dedicated to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Jacques Rancière, as well as on Spain´s 15th of May movement.

The apparently seamless order of the our world belies its tattered fragments.  The promised unity of a global order is sustained only in the realm of illusion by the flickering of screens bleating forth a continuous flow of images.  The content of the latter is meaningless, it is the flow that matters, that there be images, the spectacle of our own ongoing passivity.  But all about us are the shards of “society”, “science”, “labour”, “states”.  The seeming homogeneity of desires is fractured by unmanageable spaces, proliferating knowledges, precarious, uncertain ways of survival and sovereign authorities that exist only through open or less than hidden states of exception. Fragmentation devours all that is solid in its path, like the touch of a King Midas of instability.

“Wage labour explodes in all sorts of niches, of exception, in conditions of anomaly.  The idea of the “precariat” opportunely conceals that there is simply no longer any common experience of work, even precarious.  So that as well there can no longer be any common experience of its cessation, and the old myth of the general strike can be placed on the shelf of useless accessories.  Western medicine is reduced to tinkering with techniques that explode its doctrinal unity, such as acupuncture, hypnoses or magnetism.  Beyond the usual parliamentary fiddling, there is no longer, politically, any majority for anything.  The wisest political commentary, during the conflict generated by the Labour Law of the spring of 2016 [France], noted that two minorities, a government minority and a demonstrating minority, clashed with each other before a theatre of spectators.” (the invisible committee, Now, 19-20)*

Even our own selves dissolve in a confusing stream of disconnected feelings, experiences, thoughts, held together again in the delusion that meaning is to be found in the blind collecting of consumed experiences.

“The contemporary experience of life in a world comprised of circulation, telecommunications, networks, a chaos of information in real time and of images aiming to capture our attention is fundamentally discontinuous.” (20)

The presumed general interest dissolves and states can do no more than call upon their militarised police and their policing military to see through even the most modest of plans (e.g., Val de Suse, Gezi Park, the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Standing Rock, and the like); each “public” investment, each infrastructure project, is seen for what it is, criminal theft.

The unities of the past, the person, the nation, the state, the society and economy, and so on, were always fictions, but they were effective fictions.  “What is for sure is that the illusion of unity no longer succeeds in making illusory, in reigning in, in disciplining.  In everything, hegemony is dead and the singularities become savage: they carry with them their own meaning, and await no general order.  The little overlooking point of view that allowed anyone with a little authority to act as ventriloquist  for everyone else, to judge, to classify, to hierarchise, to moralise, to notify each person what they must do and how they should do it, has become inaudible.  All of the things that “must” be done have been laid low.” (21)

History, progress, the roots of tradition and the hopes of the future fall away.  The fragments that remain reduce our temporality to the present, to a now.  The authority of states and all that they command must thus force the illusions of History evermore, but in so doing, only further reveal the emptiness of what is supposed to seduce.  History is nothing before the latest, new and improved, consumer object/relation/experience that is condemned to obsolescence in the very moment of its consumption.  If the State’s ambition is to manage, and to manage the totality of the social life that it gives form to/creates, then it is an ambition that is increasingly strained, depending on ever greater violence and police rule; the more it tightens its hold, the more “society” implodes at its base.

“Of unity, only nostalgia remains, but it speaks louder and louder.  Everywhere candidates present themselves to restore national grander, to “Make America great again” or “bring order back to France”.  At the same time, when one is nostalgic for French Algeria, what can one be nostalgic for?  Everywhere, one promises then to remake by force the lost unity.  Only that the more one “cleaves” by discoursing on the “sentiment of belonging”, the greater the certainty that one does not belong to any of this spreads.  To mobilise the panic to restore order, is to miss what is essentially dispersive in panic.  The process of general fragmentation is so unstoppable that all of the brutalities which will be used to remake the lost unity will only accelerate it, rendering it more profound and more irreversible.  When there is no longer any common experience, except that found in front of screens, one may well create brief moments of national communion after “terrorist” attacks by deploying an array of drooling sentimentality, false and empty, one can decree all manner of “wars on terrorism”, one can promise to retake control of all “no-go areas” that one wants, all this remains a newsflash on BFM-TV, at the back end of a kebab shop, and whose sound can’t be heard.  This kind of nonsense is like medication: for it to remain effective, the dosage has to be continuously increased, until the final neurasthenia.  Those who look favourably on the perspective of ending their existence in a cramped and over-militarised citadel, even one as large as France, while all around, the water rises, carrying the bodies of the unlucky, may very well call “National traitors” all of those who displease them.  In their barking, nothing but their powerlessness is heard.” (27)

And for those who would contest, struggle against, this established order, to appeal to the same false unties that underlie capitalism would be to contribute to those same illusions, restraining what is possible within the frame of those illusions and a future order, or said differently, making possible the capture of struggles by the State.

Everything becomes plural, local, situated; paradoxically sharing the common trait of flight.  “It is not only that the people are wanting … they have already made their suitcases, in a thousand unsuspected directions.  They are not only abstentionist, in retreat, nowhere to be found: they are in flight, even if their flight would be nothing but interior or immobile.  They are already elsewhere.” (28)  And it will not be the new populists of the left, a Mélenchon or Iglesias, who will bring them back.  “What is called ‘populism’ is not only the glaring symptom of the disappearance of the people, it is a desperate attempt to hold on to what remains of the haggard and disoriented.” (29)

In the tired marches and demonstrations of labour unions and left-wing political parties, those who parade are like marionette ghosts, repeating gestures and slogans mechanically, lifelessly.  The Internationale falls like a corpse from their lips, to be swept up by the municipal street cleaners who follow.  What life erupts from these pacified processions of the living dead does so, as it did in France during the 2016 Spring, when the head of the marches were “taken” by those desirous to break with the imposed sleep, by the casseurs, the “violent rioters” quickly labelled “anarchists” and “black blocks”.  But the names hide more than they reveal, for what happened on these occasions, and again the French example is helpful, “is that a certain number of deserters created a political space where to compose their heterogeneity, an ephemeral space certainly, insufficiently organised undoubtedly, but attainable and, for the duration of a Spring, really existing.” (Now, 30)  Our fragmented world is acephalous, mirrored and multiplied in endless forms, including in the futile and paralysed left.  But those who took the “head” of the protests in Paris, for example, did not do so to provide them with a new leadership, but rather to unleash the autonomous multiple gestures that they harboured and rendered possible.

These last months, a remarkable wind of protest rose against labour law.
Facing it, the government, its ministers , its president and its police, have opted for political and police repression , at a rare level and multiplied the blows of force to quell the movement . Normalising, social violence and media manipulation are all so many symptoms that reflect the massive discomfort of a society where the people are strategically muzzled . This film is the voice of those who revolt, whoever they are, and especially those we never hear, despised by authorities, mass media and dominant discourse.]

[Gloss: The “global” occupy movement of 2011, beginning with the Arab Spring and seemingly replicating itself in numerous other countries and cities, is the most significant “social-political movement” of our time. To speak in the singular here though is to suggest a unity of intention and/or ideology across these movements which does not exist. And yet their shared occupation of city squares intimates some commonality, to be sought at other levels of lived reality. Tomás Ibáñez, writing of the Spanish movement 15M of 2011, states that it “marked in a clear way a before and an after in the scenario of protests and collective conflict.” (Anarquismos a contratiempo, 263) Ibáñez’s judgement may not be extendable to other countries for various reasons, but in the Spanish context, it echos true. However, the intensity and resonances of the movement are not due to any unified organisation, ideology or aim born with 15M. The “movement” was and remains as fragmented as the politics that it emerged to challenge. Its force, its radicalness, must therefore be found elsewhere. And for Ibáñez, everything changes the moment we focus on 15M’s organisational forms and practices of struggle, conceived and put into effect without any conscious appeals to past ways of doing politics (15M is a movement of the radical present, for good or ill).

“The originality of 15M consisted in the fact that it was an event, in the full sense of the word, that introduced new things into the political scenario charged with an unquestionable political radicalness, that curiously contrasted with the absence of any radicalness in its explicit demands.” (266) Instead of merely expressing opposition and through protest seeking change, typically at the level of State policy, 15M was much more. “Even though in the beginning, it was the usual popular concentration to express a protest and make a demand, this very quickly transformed itself into a different phenomenon. The thousands of people who invaded the streets and squares did not do so only to demonstrate against this or in favour of that, but they did so also to institute themselves or, more precisely, to self-institute themselves as subjects in a political process.” (267)

…

“This process of self-institution required that the people organise themselves, debate, elaborate collectively their own political discourse, and construct in common the necessary elements to make possible the maintenance of the mobilisation and the development of political action.”

“The importance that the rejection of representation acquired in the heart of the movement – the famous ‘they don’t represent us’, of course, but also accompanied by the refusal to be represented by any permanent entities: ‘no one can claim the right to represent us’ – indicates what the novelty was that the movement introduced into the conventional political game. In effect, a radical rupture was produced with practices that consisted of responding to agendas elaborated externally, that is by others who basically were not among the mobilised. In the public squares, diverted from its conventional and authorised uses, the imagination set to work to create spaces, construct conditions and elaborate procedures that would permit people to elaborate by themselves and collectively their own agenda, at the margin of pre-established and imported ideologies.”

“From the moment that the rejection of representation constituted itself as the active principle of the action of 15M, the only discourses, the only compromises, that were recognised and that were assumed as legitimate, were those that came from the very interior of the movement, those generated from within. Only what the movement produced through and by itself was accepted, autonomously, following the rules of free debate in a non-hierarchical frame.” (268)

The extraordinary significance of 15M thus lies not in what it promised for the future, nor in any rehabilitation of some glorious revolutionary past, ideological or practical, but in what it realised in the present. “If anything profoundly characterised 15M, it was its unyielding will for autonomy, a generalised demand for autonomy and self-determination that imposed the fixing of its own objectives and the determination of its own ways of being, as well as the rejection of domination, not allowing itself to be lead by any external entity, and to decide to act for itself.” (268)

As a political movement, an essentially plural movement, 15M sought not to weld the fragments of social life into a new, false unity, but to create a space of passage, a threshold, through and from which different agencies could enter, gain sustenance, and depart, to possibly return again. If 15M resonated and resonates still in the country, it is because its political children are many. And at its most intense, it not only shared ideas, but bodies. That is, for very, very many who came to the occupied squares of Spain’s cities, what they found was not a politics segregated from all other spheres of life, “politics” as usual, but a politics embedded in life and the care that makes possible the reproduction of forms of life in radical opposition to capitalism, if any such opposition is to be true. 15M was not ideology, organisation, fixed practices, leadership, representatives, but the sharing, to speak metaphorically, of wine and bread in a life giving meal that could be re-enacted and edified into a form of life.

Podemos is Judas at this supper, but the murder that it desires and with which it is complicitous has so far failed.

The invisible committee is critical of Nuit Debout, France’s incarnation of the “occupy movement”, precisely for its fetishism of form, democratic form, voting upon matters that could have no possible execution and which in the end only served to domesticate the occupation. If it too was lacking in any homogeneity, if unplanned gatherings and demonstrations also gestated in its midst, if it also contributed to making the movement against the proposed labour law reform of 2016 in France much more than simply another protest movement, it came to grief on the separation of politics from life and the presumed and desired sovereignty of the former; the belief that life can be governed, mirrored in the image of government of the self. (Now, 52-6)

The invisible committee’s argument here takes us further than most of the political readings of the occupy movements. For what emerges from their considerations is a re-thinking of the very concept of autonomy. So often imagined in terms of self-possession, it finds expression in the State and in the person in the concept of sovereignty. Neither of the two, State or person, are conceivable without it. But then neither are imaginable without violence, the violence that represses and/or destroys that which escapes rule. The task then is to think and live autonomy beyond sovereignty; a sovereignty which in any case has been irretrievably lost in the debris of capitalism’s disaster. The anonymous many who have filled streets and city squares are the uprooted and disoriented offspring of the disaster, who gather not as the “people united”, but as a community of the nameless.]

If any semblance of unity continues to structure State authority, it is only through fear, surveillance and the physical presence of police.  The law, the armour of declared and legislated rights that is supposed to protect each citizen’s moral and physical integrity, and thus the guarantor of social unity, is an edifice of ruins.  Indeed, as far as the invisible committee is concerned, the Law no longer exists. (33)

“As long as the security of our fellow citizens justifies it, as long as administrative search warrants [passed without a judicial decision] that only the state of emergency allow are indispensable, it is advisable to maintain the state of emergency.”  The words were proffered by Emmanuel Macron during the French presidential election campaign and they are now confirmed by his desired extension of the legal exception until the 1st of November, bringing the state of emergency in France up to two years.  Whatever hesitations he may have had in the past have vanished (“We cannot live permanently in a regime of exception.  It is necessary to return to ordinary law … and to act with the right instruments.  We have the legislative apparatus permitting us to respond, over time, to our situation”).  And in parallel, there is a proposal for a new and additional anti-terrorist law. (Liberation 24/05/2017)  As such laws multiply, both in France and elsewhere, states of emergency in fact cease to be exceptional; such laws create distinct legal subjects with different rights and duties.  And as they do so, the diminished rights of suspected criminals and terrorists seep into the fabric of general law, rendering everyone a potential suspect.

The German legal theorist Günther Jakobs elaborated a distinction between two criminal laws: one for “citizens” and another for “enemies”.  For Jakobs, the latter includes the rabble, radical opponents, thugs and rogues, “terrorists”, “anarchists”, in sum, all of those who fail to sufficiently respect the reigning democratic order and thereby represent a “danger” to the “normative structure of society”.  Should not then such “dangerous individuals” be treated as enemies of society? Do they not exclude themselves from ordinary criminal law, justifying the elaboration of a criminal law for enemies? (33)  But to elaborate a law for enemies, is to erase the Schmittian distinction of friend-enemy, which places the enemy outside a constituted sovereignty.  That is, it makes all of us potential enemies, it renders the exception normal, thus destroying “normal” criminal law altogether.  (The example of the increasing criminalisation of dissent in Spain in the wake of 15M, with the law of Citizen Security of 2013 and the recent police operations, pandoraand piñata, against anarchists, is but one example among many today).

“However paradoxical this affirmation may appear, we live in the time of the abolition of the Law.  The metastatic proliferation of laws is nothing but one aspect of this abolition.  If each law had not become insignificant in the rococo of contemporary law, would it be necessary to produce so many?  Would it be necessary to communicate, with each event, by means of the enactment of new legislation?  The aim of the great legal reforms over the last years in France amount almost all to the abolition of current laws, to the progressive dismantling of all judicial guarantees.  So much so that the Law, which professed to protect men/women and things before the hazards of the world, has instead become what adds to their precariousness.”  The state of exception today reigns “under the form of the law.” (34-5)

[Gloss: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History]

There are two ways to respond to the state of emergency, we are told by the invisible committee.  The first is to denounce it and call for the return of a state of law; an illusory exercise that calls for what never really existed, because the law depends upon the exception, on the constitution of those who are outside the law.  There is no law without the violence of separation and that violence is always potentially and in fact directed at the body constituted by the State. The second response is to assume the exception of the law.  If the State frees itself from its laws under the exception, then it is for those who contest the State to do the same.  “There are those who protest against a phantom, the state of emergency, and there are those who take action and deploy from their own state of exception.” (38)

Before the permanent state of exception, “the maintenance of order is the principle activity of an already failed order”. (109)  And the greater the fragmentation of social order, the greater is the presence of an increasingly militarised police.

The loss of all hope among the increasingly superfluous many is also the condition for pure revolt, a “revolt that no longer seeks support in what it denies and which is its own self-authorisation”. (110)  Before such disobedience, potential or active, politics is reduced to a vast, daily police operation. (110)  And thus rebellion can only direct itself at the body of the State, namely, the police.  In Paris, the slogan was, “Everyone hates the police”.

That this statement should appear shocking to some is testimony to the successful imposition of sovereignty by modern State power.  At the beginning of the 17th century, for the first thinkers on sovereignty, the police were held to be the very constitution of the State, its very form, rather than a mere instrument of State authority.  The police was thus “all that can give ornament, form and splendour to the city” (Turquet de Mayerne), “the ensemble of means that serve the splendor of the whole State and the happiness of all of its citizens” (Hohenthal).  Its role is to “lead man to the most perfect felicity that he may enjoy in this life” (Delmare). (111-2)  The police then are the government of all of the conditions that render this felicity possible, from the cleanliness of streets to the imprisonment of vagabonds. (112)  It is the police as identical with to be policed, that is, ordered, administered, governed by policy, belonging to the city, the polis, the realm of the civilised, in contrast to the savage, those outside the city, inhabitants of unpolicedforests.  The police in this instance are the very end of sovereignty: the ideal, legal and ultimately fictional order of the world.  The police however must also assure that the order is real, or as real as possible.  And here it appears as a means to its own ideal end.  Yet without the former, the latter reveals itself as a fiction, and thus “the function of the police as a means is to ensure that from the outside the order desired appears to reign”.  Failure however haunts its double role.  To act from the “outside” with “necessary” violence is to act from outside the law, to act illegally, to preserve the law.  The police is the very embodiment of the paradox of sovereignty, the paradox that the sovereign who defines the legal order does so in an initial act that is a-legal; that the sovereign who defends the constituted order does so through illegalacts.  The police “are the proof that the legal is not the real, that order does not reign, that society does not hold because it does not hold by itself“; that all are the work and consequence of their force, a permanent agency of exception in the heart of constituted and “constitutional” political authority.  “If the state of exception is this temporary suspension of the law that permits re-establishing, by the most arbitrary and bloody measures, the condition for the rule of law, the police is what remains of the state of exception when these conditions have been restored.  The police, in their daily functioning, is what persists of the state of exception in normal circumstances.  It is why its sovereign functioning is itself so hidden.” (113)

A French CRS police officer, after arresting someone for no reason during the Paris Spring protests states: “I do what I want.  You see, it’s anarchy for me also!” (113)

“The police thus ensure an apparent order that is from within only disorder.  It is the truth of a world of lies, and by continuous lies.  It confirms that the reigning order is artificial, and that it will sooner or later be destroyed.” (114)

The police is unmasked.  It is not that everyone in fact hates the police.  They do not.  But for those who cry out loudly that they do, they have excellent reasons for doing so.  The fragmentation of State power and authority however changes the relation between government and police.  Once the mere instruments of politicians, the generalised discredit of the latter renders the police the very condition of government.  It is the politicians who now turn to them before any crisis, and cede to them on every demand.  Few police bodies would be able, or even willing, to assume openly political autonomy; and for such a body to do so would be to engender a government at war with all or a part of its population. (115-8)

And in response: “It would be senseless to seek a military victory over the police. … The police is a target and not an objective, an obstacle and not an adversary.  Whoever takes the cops for an adversary prohibits themselves  from breaking through the obstacle that they are.  To be able to sweep them aside, one has to aim beyond.  Against the police, there is only political victory.  Disorganise their ranks, strip them of all legitimacy, reduce them to impotence, hold them at a good distance, grant oneself a larger margin of manoeuvre at the desired moment, as in the chosen places: thus is the police destituted.” (118)

Suffered, the processes of fragmentation may push us towards misery, isolation, schizophrenia.  Life may be lived as a pure waste.  Nostalgia then possesses us; nostalgia for family, nation, or so many other fictions of wholeness.  For is not belonging the only thing that remains to those who no longer have anything?  Yet this same fragmentation can also be a starting point, it may also give rise to an intensification and pluralisation of the “relations that make us.” (41)  Perhaps then we may see finally that it was our “integration in society” that was “a slow loss of being, a continuous separation, a slipping towards ever greater vulnerability, and an ever more disguised vulnerability.” (41)

“There is in the fragmentation something that points towards what we call ‘communism’: it is the return to earth, the ruin of everything made equivalent, the restitution of all singularities to themselves, the failure of subsumption, abstraction, the fact that moments, places, things, beings and animals all acquire their own name – their own name.  Every creation is born of a rupture with the whole. … If the Earth is so rich in natural milieus, it is in virtue of is complete absence of uniformity.  To realise the promise of communism held within the fragmentation of the world calls for a gesture, a gesture to be repeated interminably, a gesture that is life itself: that of to provide passages between the fragments, to put them into contact, to organise their encounter, to open the paths that lead from one friendly bit of the world to another without passing through hostile territory, that of establishing the good art of distances between the worlds.” (43)

What these connected fragments are remains open, changing.  But they are held together in moving affinities of plural forms of life, archipelagos of life beyond the politics of institutionalised and enforced spectacular commoditification.

__________

*Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to the essay Maintenant, published by La fabrique, 2017.

source: http://autonomies.org/2017/05/reading-our-times-with-now-the-invisible-committee/

The post Reading our times with “NOW”: The invisible committee appeared first on Void Network.

This shows that, even with the very latest technologies, no amount of police violence can control a population that is determined to refuse to be dominated. This is good news for partisans of freedom everywhere around the world.

As we compose these lines, the police are storming Schanze with the utmost of brute force, recklessly pointing machine guns at reporters and everyone else, seeking to avenge themselves on those who remain on the streets after most participants have gone home to rest. The special forces units of Hamburg and five other cities are deployed on the streets, as well as Austrian special forces. But no amount of violence and oppression can conceal the fact that they lost control—and more importantly, that they never deserved control in the first place.

Conspiracy theory nuts will allege that the G20 was intentionally placed in Hamburg to provoke the population in order to justify further crackdowns on civil liberties. This is half true: in putting the G20 immediately beside one of the most radical neighborhoods in Germany, the authorities were testing the population to see how much people will put up with. Hamburg is being treated as an experimental laboratory of repression, with police officers brought in from several other nations in the European Union to study repressive techniques.

But if we can make it impossible for the police to control us despite more than one out of every twelve officers in all of Germany being concentrated in a single city, then surely we can defend our freedom from the state as a whole. The point here is that we cannot be cowardly, clinging to the illusion that the state will permit us our freedoms if only we are submissive enough. No people has ever achieved or retained freedom that way.

Things have reached a point of no return: the future will be revolutionary liberation, or it will be a police state. The supposed middle ground, in which limited freedoms are watched over by a state restrained by the will of the people, has always been a myth, an illusion that is harder and harder to maintain.

Let’s look closer at the breakdown of police control. In 1987, the German police began to shift to their current model for crowd control, in order to correct for the ways that crowds had outmaneuvered and defeated them—especially on May Day of that year. The subsequent model of German policing, in which long lines of riot police are supplemented with highly mobile snatch squads that maintain close contact with the crowd, has more or less served to control urban unrest until now. (For a more thorough overview of the recent history of German police tactics, consult this helpful article.)

In 2017, exactly thirty years after the origins of this model, the crowds of Hamburg succeeded in once more outmaneuvering and defeating the police. This time, they did so by spreading the action over a vast area of the city, moving swiftly and focusing on decentralized actions. Whenever the police established a control line, people gathered on the other side of it—not only demonstrators, but also supportive spectators. Small, highly organized and mobile groups of demonstrators were able to identify exit routes and carry out swift attacks, while larger crowds stretched the police one direction, then another. The more territory the police had to control, the more they antagonized the population, and the more demonstrators they had to deal with as their lines became more and more thinly stretched. Finally, they lost control of the most unruly regions and were forced to retreat entirely.

In addition to tactical concerns, however, the most important blow to the police has been that, by going to far in seeking to control the population by brute force, they lost legitimacy in the public eye. Their absurd and unprovoked attack on yesterday’s Welcome to Hell demonstration turned the entire city against them. No wonder they have lost control.

They will surely regain it, probably at the cost of a great deal of suffering inflicted at random on those who remain on the streets. But we should be heartened by the fact that they were beaten, that they could not control the population—and we should be inspired by the tremendous courage that people have shown in Hamburg, standing up to such a powerful adversary and refusing to back down.

Schanze district has been liberated for several hours, with protesters actively defending it at barricades. Within the area are many looted shops, barricades on fire, and people ready to fight. As we write, special police forces are preparing to enter the rebellious zone in huge numbers, armed with water cannons and heavy equipment. As the cops try to remove the barricades, the people of Schanze are fighting back.

Special forces are carrying automatic weapons as they stand on the rooftops across the districts of Schanze. Cops have aimed guns at the press, as well. Weapons with live ammunition are confirmed.

As the night descends on Hamburg, we can see the full moon through the smoke. People are playing volleyball in the street, celebrating their victory over the forces of the G20 and attempted police occupations of their streets. There are even bigger reasons to celebrate as we anticipate a long and rebellious night ahead.

Despite numerous attempts by the police, the state, and mainstream media to divide protesters by framing them as either “violent” or “non-violent,” Hamburg’s message remains clear: solidarity without compromise. When police attack demonstrations with brutal force, without provocation, the people turn against them. The police, working hand in hand with the media, attempted to spread fear by describing hordes of wild, autonomous radicals streaming into Hamburg from across the world, bringing pandemonium. Yet at the end of the day, Hamburg’s own people defended it from police aggression, refusing to give in or give up any of their comrades in black fighting fiercely alongside them for their streets.

As we see how intense and widespread the clashes have been in Hamburg over the last 48 hours, as we witness people’s determination to regather every time the police push them back, and particularly the joy with which they resist when told to stay away, it is clear that this struggle in Hamburg is more than just a struggle against G20.

The post THE POLICE LOST IN HAMBURG: WHY THEY COULDN’T KEEP CONTROL – Πώς το Αμβούργο νίκησε την αστυνομία appeared first on Void Network.

THIS IS HELL – HAMBURG 6-9 JULY 2017 against G20

The residents of Hamburg woke up this morning to the news that a large number of Porsches had been burned in the outskirts last night, giving an indication of the ungovernable energy with which Hamburg would resist this intrusion. Despite the police controlling busses and trains full of activists at the border, they simply could not stop the crowds that gathered in the city center for the Welcome to Hell demonstration. The crowds they had to fear were not a few radical activists listed in the files of the secret police, but the population of Hamburg itself, which came together in opposition to the militarized policing that the G20 forced on the city.

The German police had brought together approximately 20,000 officers, including troops from other EU countries, with the intention of utterly quashing resistance. They brutally raided the camp that activists set up to accommodate protesters, then attacked people who gathered to enjoy themselves in the streets on July 4 and 5. They did everything they could to spread fear, in hopes of intimidating people out of showing up to the demonstrations to express their feelings about capitalism and the state.

It didn’t work. The Welcome to Hell demonstration attracted multigenerational crowds prepared to participate in blocs, black and otherwise. Thousands of people came together with joy, courage, and determination. In response, the police attacked a permitted demonstration without any justification—creating panic, severely injuring many people, and making more than 50 arrests in the first wave of repressive violence.
Yet this only served to foment more outrage against the authorities, which spread all around the city in the form of burning cars, barricades, and multiple simultaneous clashes and demonstrations of thousands. The strategy of terrorizing and kettling people with tremendous numbers of officers using brand-new militarized police equipment and brutal force simply failed. There were too many people on the streets and the police lost control. They report that 76 officers were injuredin Hamburg tonight.

There was a lot at stake today. The German state and the world leaders wanted to show that they are in control, that their reign is popular—or, failing that, that they can successfully dominate the population. They wanted the world to see that they can freely harass, intimidate, and oppress people without consequences. They wanted to flaunt their power by bringing the G20 to a center of resistance. Instead, they demonstrated their weakness.

Tonight, with the help of courageous people from around the world, Hamburg stood up and said Enough. We are humbled and inspired. We will continue tomorrow.

for more info about the riots against G20 in Hamburg:
https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/welcome-to-hell-g20-hamburg/
https://crimethinc.com/2017/07/05/announcing-continuous-live-coverage-of-the-g20-in-hamburg-with-an-update-from-the-clashes-of-july-4

see also: The Police Lost in Hamburg: Why They Couldn’t keep control 

ΚΑΛΩΣ ΗΡΘΑΤΕ ΣΤΗΝ ΚΟΛΑΣΗ Αμβούργο 6-9 Ιουλίου 2017  Eνάντια στους G20

Οι κάτοικοι του Αμβούργου ξύπνησαν σήμερα το πρωί ακούγοντας στις ειδήσεις ότι ένας μεγάλος αριθμός Porsche είχε καεί στα περίχωρα της πόλης τους χθες το βράδυ, δίνοντας μια ένδειξη για την ανεξέλεγκτη ενέργεια με την οποία το Αμβούργο θα αντισταθεί στην εισβολή των G20. Παρά την απόφαση της αστυνομίας να ελέγχει λεωφορεία και τρένα γεμάτα ακτιβιστές στα σύνορα, απλά δεν μπορούσαν να σταματήσουν τα πλήθη που συγκεντρώθηκαν στο κέντρο της πόλης για την διαδήλωση «Καλώς Ήρθατε στην Κόλαση. Τα πλήθη που φοβόντουσαν δεν ήταν απλά μερικοί ριζοσπάστες ακτιβιστές που απαριθμούνται στους φακέλους της μυστικής αστυνομίας, αλλά ο πληθυσμός του ίδιου του Αμβούργου, ο οποίος συναντήθηκε σε αντιπαράθεση με την στρατιωτική βία της αστυνομίας που εξαπέλυσαν οι G20 στην πόλη.

Η γερμανική αστυνομία είχε συγκεντρώσει περίπου 20.000 αξιωματικούς, συμπεριλαμβανομένων μονάδων από άλλες χώρες της ΕΕ, με σκοπό την πλήρη εξάλειψη της αντίστασης. Εκκένωσαν βίαια τον καταυλισμό που οι ακτιβιστές έστησαν για να φιλοξενήσουν διαδηλωτές και έπειτα επιτέθηκαν σε ανθρώπους που συγκεντρώθηκαν για να απολαύσουν τους δρόμους στις 4 και 5 Ιουλίου. Έκαναν ό, τι μπορούσαν για να εξαπλώσουν τον τρόμο, ελπίζοντας να εκφοβίσουν τους ανθρώπους ώστε να μην εμφανιστούν στους δρόμους και να μην συμμετάσχουν στις διαδηλώσεις. Τις διαδηλώσεις που οργανώθηκαν για να εκφράσουμε όλοι μας τα συναισθήματά μας ενάντια στον καπιταλισμό και το κράτος.

Ο εκφοβισμός δεν λειτούργησε. Η διαδήλωση «Καλώς Ήρθατε  στην Κόλαση» προσέλκυσε μεγάλα πλήθη πολλών διαφορετικών γενεών προετοιμασμένα να συμμετάσχουν σε μπλοκ, μαύρα ή και αλλιώς. Χιλιάδες άνθρωποι συναντήθηκαν με χαρά, θάρρος και αποφασιστικότητα. Απαντώντας, η αστυνομία επιτέθηκε σε μια αδειοδοτημένη διαδήλωση χωρίς δικαιολογίες για να δημιουργήσει πανικό, τραυματίζοντας σοβαρά πολλούς ανθρώπους και κάνοντας πάνω από 50 συλλήψεις στο πρώτο κύμα καταπιεστικής βίας.

Ωστόσο, το γεγονός αυτό απλώς προκάλεσε περισσότερη οργή εναντίον των αρχών. Οι ταραχές εξαπλώθηκαν σε όλη την πόλη με τη μορφή καύσης αυτοκινήτων, ξηλώματος οδοστρωμάτων και πολλαπλών ταυτόχρονων συγκρούσεων και διαδηλώσεων χιλιάδων ανθρώπων. Η στρατηγική της τρομοκράτησης των ανθρώπων από την αστυνοία με στην χρήση τεράστιου αριθμού αξιωματικών που χρησιμοποιούν ολοκαίνουργιο στρατιωτικό εξοπλισμό και η βίαιη επίθεση της αστυνομίας απλά απέτυχε. Υπήρχαν πάρα πολλοί άνθρωποι στους δρόμους και η αστυνομία έχασε τον έλεγχο. Αναφέρουν ότι 76 αστυνομικοί τραυματίστηκαν στο Αμβούργο απόψε.

Υπήρξαν πολλά που διακυβεύονται σήμερα. Το γερμανικό κράτος και οι ηγέτες του κόσμου ήθελαν να δείξουν ότι έχουν τον έλεγχο, ότι η βασιλεία τους είναι δημοφιλής – ή, αν όχι, ότι μπορούν να κυριαρχήσουν με επιτυχία στον πληθυσμό. Ήθελαν να δείξουν στον κόσμο ότι μπορούν ελεύθερα να παρενοχλούν, να εκφοβίζουν και να καταπιέζουν τους ανθρώπους χωρίς συνέπειες. Ήθελαν να καμαρώνουν την εξουσία τους φέρνοντας το G20 σε κέντρο μιας πόλης αντίστασης. Αντ ‘αυτού, απέδειξαν την αδυναμία τους.

Απόψε, με τη βοήθεια θαρραλέων ανθρώπων από όλο τον κόσμο, το Αμβούργο ξεσηκώθηκε και είπε ΑΡΚΕΤΑ. Είμαστε ταπεινοί και εμπνευσμένοι. Θα συνεχίσουμε ξανά από αύριο.

περισσότερες πληροφορίες για τις συγκρούσεις ενάντια στους G20 στο Αμβούργο:
https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/welcome-to-hell-g20-hamburg/
https://crimethinc.com/2017/07/05/announcing-continuous-live-coverage-of-the-g20-in-hamburg-with-an-update-from-the-clashes-of-july-4

δείτε επίσης: ΠΩΣ ΤΟ ΑΜΒΟΥΡΓΟ ΝΙΚΗΣΕ ΤΗΝ ΑΣΤΥΝΟΜΙΑ https://voidnetwork.gr/2017/07/10

The post WELCOME TO HELL – G20 in Hamburg 2017 – video archives of a social revolt appeared first on Void Network.

*A joint statement published on the occasion of Obama’s visit to Athens, Greece by Void Network (https://voidnetwork.gr/) and the CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective (USA)

Today, November 14, outgoing US President Barack Obama arrives in Greece. Speaking from both the United States and Greece, we call on every partisan of freedom to participate in the night demonstration called for Athens on November 15 / starts from Athens Polytechnic at 17.30 .

It is symbolic that Obama is visiting Greece on his farewell tour. The Balkans have served as a laboratory for neoliberalism and US military interventions since the late 20th century; Greece in particular has undergone a global experiment of crisis management and repression. As war draws closer and closer—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey—the Balkans are expected to serve Europe and the US as a buffer zone while suffering the same abuse as the periphery.

Now that the pipe dream of universal economic growth has come to an end, giving way to a vista of chaos and climate catastrophe, we can see that the new order will only be stabilized by the empty promises of politicians and the brute force of the police and military: by the ballot and the bullet. The buffer zone is getting smaller and smaller, and the United States is not exempt—the same National Guard sent to Iraq have already been deployed in Baltimore. Now is the time to fight, before the situation grows any worse.

In expressing shock and outrage about the election of Donald Trump, many on the Left have obscured the systemic nature of the problem. By taking action against the Democratic favorite of the US, we show that our opposition is not directed against any particular representative, but against the state and capitalism themselves. In the pleas Clinton and Obama have made for a “peaceful transition of power” to a man they declared unfit to rule, we see the collusion of liberals who would rather preserve the apparatus of the state even in the hands of outright fascists than permit real freedom to emerge.

Indeed, as the candidate of supposed “Hope” and “Change,” Obama not only preserved the structures of power, but persuaded many of the people who are most targeted by the system to invest more faith and resources in those structures—which will now be used to repress them more aggressively than ever. Just as we reject the false solutions of Syriza, we understand that Obama’s reputation as a “good” politician has only made him more dangerous to those he purports to protect. Those who promise a more “inclusive” neoliberalism today pave the way for tomorrow’s fascism.

Obama has deported two and a half million people, as many as all the US Presidents of the 20th century combined—turning Mexico and Central America into a detention center for the population capitalism has no use for. Just as we act in solidarity with those targeted by the so-called “migrant crisis,” a crisis imposed by the borders and wars that are endemic to capitalism, we act against Obama in solidarity with all the people of Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and the world. If we don’t tear down the borders that fence other people out today, who will help us tear down the borders that fence us out tomorrow?

As the first Black President, Obama has served the agenda of those who want to convey the impression that white supremacy is a thing of the past. Yet under his reign, a million Black people have languished in prison while police have murdered Black people in the streets with impunity on a daily basis. Over the past months, we have seen indigenous warriors attacked by the same police for defending the water that gives life to their communities. Inspired by the courageous fighters of Ferguson, Baltimore, Oakland, and Standing Rock, we aim to strike blows against racism, prisons, and police everywhere.

These struggles will not be concluded when Obama leaves Greece, nor when he exits office. As President of the most hegemonic state power of our era, Obama represents the interlaced and mutually reinforcing hierarchies that divide humanity—property, citizenship, gender roles, and every other form of authority—yet he himself is merely a cog in a much greater machine. When he is replaced this coming January, the economic interests that have pulled the strings in his administration will move on to utilizing Donald Trump to the same ends, albeit via a more overtly brutal strategy suitable to these times.

We, too, must update our strategies. Today, fewer and fewer people retain the illusion that voting, party politics, or the state could solve the problems we face. The situation is the same the world over. When we take action against politicians, we must not understand ourselves as engaging in mere protest. We are not simply seeking to obtain leverage by militant means. We are developing forms of self-defense in order to open up liberated spaces in which we can experiment with ways to meet our own needs, directly, rather than being experimented upon.

We have to undertake immediate initiatives to create communities of struggle everywhere—opening spaces and social centers, organizing discussions and demonstrations, liberating public spaces, breaking through apathy and isolation, producing free food, shelter, and culture for all. We have to think freedom and enact emancipation.

The blows we strike in Greece will resonate across the world, from all the other peripheries to the very heart of the United States. Together, let us become ungovernable.

*For international coordination and solidarity in the struggle against global capitalism and the state*

*For anarchy, the perpetual reinvention of our relations in pursuit of freedom*

*For freedom, the collective capacity to fulfill our tremendous potential on our own terms*

Jointly composed and signed—
CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective
Void Network [Theory, Outopia, Empathy, Ephemeral Arts]

Καλώς ήρθες στην Αθήνα Ομπάμα

Κοινή δημόσια ανακοίνωση που δημοσιεύθηκε με την ευκαιρία της επίσκεψης του Μπάρακ Ομπάμα στην Ελλάδα από το ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ (Αθήνα) και την “Συλλογικότητα πρώην- Εργαζομένων” Crimethinc (ΗΠΑ)

Σήμερα 14 Νοεμβρίου, ο απερχόμενος πρόεδρος των ΗΠΑ Μπαράκ Ομπάμα φτάνει στην Ελλάδα. Οι συλλογικότητες μας καλούν τόσο από τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες όσο και από την Ελλάδα κάθε άνθρωπο που αγωνίζεται  για την ελευθερία να συμμετάσχει στη διαδήλωση το βράδυ της Τρίτης 15 Νοεμβρίου 2016 στους δρόμους της Αθήνας με έναρξη το Πολυτεχνείο στις 5.30 μ.μ.μ.

Το γεγονός ότι ο Μπάρακ Ομπάμα επισκέπτεται την Ελλάδα στην αποχαιρετιστήρια περιοδεία του αποκτά έντονους συμβολισμούς. Τα Βαλκάνια έχουν υπηρετήσει ως εργαστήριο πειραμάτων για το νεοφιλελευθερισμό και τις στρατιωτικές επεμβάσεις των ΗΠΑ από τα τέλη του 20ου αιώνα. Η Ελλάδα ειδικότερα έχει υποστεί στις μέρες μας ένα παγκόσμιο πείραμα εφαρμογής μοντέλων διαχείρισης κρίσεων και κοινωνικής καταπίεσης. Καθώς ο πόλεμος πλησιάζει όλο και πιο κοντά, στο Αφγανιστάν, το Ιράκ, τη Συρία, την Ουκρανία και την Τουρκία, τα Βαλκάνια αναμένεται να εξυπηρετήσουν την Ευρώπη και τις ΗΠΑ ως ουδέτερη ζώνη, ενώ θα υπομένουν την ίδια κακοποίηση με όλη την υπόλοιπη περιφέρεια.

Τώρα που η ψευδαίσθηση της καθολικής οικονομικής ανάπτυξης έφτασε στο τέλος της μπορούμε να δούμε ξεκάθαρα ότι η νέα τάξη πραγμάτων θα σταθεροποιηθεί μόνο με τις κενές υποσχέσεις των πολιτικών και την ωμή βία της αστυνομίας και του στρατού: με τα ψηφοδέλτια και τις σφαίρες. Η ουδέτερη ζώνη γίνεται όλο και μικρότερη, και οι Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες δεν εξαιρούνται από αυτή την διαδικασία-η ίδια Εθνοφρουρά που περιπολεί απόψε στο Ιράκ έχει ήδη παραταχθεί και στους δρόμους της Βαλτιμόρης. Τώρα είναι η ώρα να πολεμήσουμε, πριν η κατάσταση γίνεται χειρότερη.

Εκφράζοντας σοκ και οργή για την εκλογή του Donald Trump, πολλοί στην Αριστερά έχουν αποκρύψει τη συστημική φύση του προβλήματος. Με την ανάληψη δράσης ενάντια στον Μπαράκ Ομπάμα, τον αγαπημένο πρόεδρο των Δημοκρατικών στις ΗΠΑ, δείχνουμε ότι η αντίθεσή μας δεν στρέφεται εναντίον κάποιου συγκεκριμένου εκπρόσωπου, αλλά εναντίον του κράτους και του ίδιου του καπιταλισμού. Στους πρόσφατους μετεκλογικούς λόγους τους, η Χιλαρι Κλίντον και ο Ομπάμα μίλησαν για μια “ειρηνική μετάβαση της εξουσίας» σε έναν άνθρωπο που έχουν οι ίδιοι χαρακτηρίσει ως ακατάλληλο να κυβερνήσει, αποκαλύπτοντας τη σύμπραξη των φιλελεύθερων, που με σκοπό να διατηρήσουν τη λειτουργία του κράτους είναι πρόθυμοι να παραδώσουν την εξουσία ακόμη και στα χέρια των απροκάλυπτων φασιστών από το να αποδεχθούν την ανάδυση της πραγματικής ελευθερίας.

Πράγματι, ως υποψήφιος της δήθεν “Ελπίδας” και της “Αλλαγής”, ο Ομπάμα όχι μόνο διέσωσε τις δομές εξουσίας, αλλά και έπεισε πάρα πολλούς ανθρώπους που υπομένουν την πιο στοχευμένη επίθεση από το σύστημα να επενδύσουν περισσότερη ακόμα πίστη και πόρους σε αυτές τις δομές- οι οποίες τώρα θα χρησιμοποιηθούν για να τους καταπιέσουν πιο επιθετικά από ποτέ. Με τον ίδιο τρόπο με τον οποίο έχουμε απορρίψει τις ψεύτικες λύσεις του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, καταλαβαίνουμε ότι η φήμη του Ομπάμα ως “καλός” πολιτικός τον κάνει ακόμα πιο επικίνδυνο για αυτούς που φιλοδοξεί να προστατεύσει. Εκείνοι που υπόσχονται έναν νεοφιλελευθερισμό «χωρίς αποκλεισμούς» σήμερα, είναι αυτοί που ανοίγουν τον δρόμο για τον αυριανό φασισμό.

Ο Ομπάμα έχει απελάσει δυόμιση εκατομμύρια ανθρώπους, ίσο αριθμό με όσους έχουν απελάσει όλοι μαζί οι Πρόεδροι των ΗΠΑ ολόκληρο τον 20ο αιώνα, μετατρέποντας το Μεξικό και την Κεντρική Αμερική σε ένα απέραντο κέντρο κράτησης για τους πληθυσμούς που για τον καπιταλισμό δεν έχουν καμία χρήση. Ακριβώς όπως δρουμε σε αλληλεγγύη με εκείνους που στοχεύονται από τη λεγόμενη “προσφυγική κρίση”, μια κρίση που επιβάλλεται από την ύπαρξη των συνόρων και των πολέμων που είναι ενδημικοί στον καπιταλισμό, δρούμε εναντίον Ομπάμα σε αλληλεγγύη με όλους τους ανθρώπους του Μεξικού, της Νικαράγουας, της Ονδούρας, του Ελ Σαλβαδόρ και όλου του κόσμου. Αν δεν γκρεμίσουμε μαζί τα σύνορα που φυλακίζουν άλλους ανθρώπους σήμερα, ποίοι θα ενωθούν μαζί μας για να γκρεμίσουμε αύριο τα σύνορα και τους φράχτες που κρατάνε εμάς φυλακισμένους;

Ως ο πρώτος μαύρος πρόεδρος, ο Ομπάμα έχει υπηρετήσει την ατζέντα όσων θέλουν να δοθεί η εντύπωση ότι η ρατσιστική “λευκή υπεροχή” είναι ένα πράγμα του παρελθόντος. Ωστόσο, στο πλαίσιο της βασιλείας του, ένα εκατομμύριο μαύροι λιώνουν στις φυλακές, ενώ η αστυνομία δολοφονούσε ατιμώρητη έναν μαύρο στους δρόμους των Η.Π.Α. κάθε μέρα. Κατά τη διάρκεια των τελευταίων μηνών, έχουμε δει πολεμιστές αμερικανικών ιθαγενικών πληθυσμών να δέχονται επιθέσεις από την ίδια αστυνομία για την υπεράσπιση του νερού που δίνει ζωή στις κοινότητές τους. Εμπνευσμένοι από τους θαρραλέους μαχητές και τις μαχήτριες του Φέργκιουσον, της Βαλτιμόρης, του Oakland, και του Standing Rock, έχουμε ως στόχο να καταφέρουμε και εμείς ισχυρά χτυπήματα κατά του ρατσισμού, των φυλακών και της αστυνομίας παντού.

Φυσικά αυτοί οι αγώνες δεν θα ολοκληρωθούν όταν ο Ομπάμα φύγει από την Ελλάδα, ούτε όταν θα εγκαταλείψει το προεδρικό μέγαρο. Ως Πρόεδρος της πιο ηγεμονικής κρατικής εξουσίας της εποχής μας, ο Ομπάμα προσωποποιεί όλες τις διαπλεκόμενες και αμοιβαία ενισχυόμενες ιεραρχίες που διαχωρίζουν την ανθρωπότητα -την ιδιοκτησία, την ιθαγένεια, τους ρόλους των δύο φύλων, καθώς και κάθε άλλη μορφή εξουσίας- και όμως, ακόμη και ο ίδιος, δεν είναι τίποτα άλλο πάρα ένα γρανάζι σε μια πολύ μεγαλύτερη μηχανή. Όταν αντικατασταθεί τον ερχόμενο Ιανουάριο, τα οικονομικά συμφέροντα που κρατούσαν τα νήματα της διακυβέρνησης του και καθόριζαν τις επιλογές του θα προχωρήσουν αξιοποιώντας τον Donald Trump με τους ίδιους βασικούς στόχους, έστω και μέσω μιας πιο απροκάλυπτα βίαιης στρατηγικής, κατάλληλης για αυτούς τους χρόνους που μας περιμένουν.

Από μεριάς μας και εμείς επίσης, πρέπει να ανανεώσουμε τις στρατηγικές μας. Σήμερα, όλο και λιγότεροι άνθρωποι διατηρούν την ψευδαίσθηση ότι οι εκλογές, το κόμμα, ή το κράτος θα μπορούσαν να λύσουν τα προβλήματα που αντιμετωπίζουμε. Όταν παίρνουμε μέτρα εναντίον πολιτικών σαν τον Ομπάμα, δεν πρέπει να κατανοούμε τους εαυτούς μας ως συμμέτοχους σε μια απλή διαμαρτυρία. Δεν  επιδιώκουμε απλά να αποκτήσουμε δύναμη με μαχητικά μέσα. Αναπτύσσουμε μορφές αυτο-άμυνας, προκειμένου να δημιουργήσουμε απελευθερωμένους χώρους στους οποίους μπορούμε να πειραματιστούμε με τους δικούς μας τρόπους για να καλύψουμε τις δικές μας ανάγκες, άμεσα, αντί άλλοι να υποβάλλουν τις ζωές μας σε πειράματα.

ΝΑ ΠΑΡΟΥΜΕ ΤΗΝ ΜΟΙΡΑ ΜΑΣ ΣΤΑ ΧΕΡΙΑ ΜΑΣ. Να πάρουμε άμεσα πρωτοβουλίες, να δημιουργήσουμε κοινότητες αγώνα παντού, να ανοίξουμε χώρους, στέκια, καταλήψεις, σημεία συνάντησης, να καταλάβουμε και να απελευθερώσουμε τον δημόσιο χώρο, να ανοίξουμε συζητήσεις, να οργανώσουμε διαδηλώσεις, να παράγουμε ελεύθερη τροφή, στέγη και κουλτούρα για όλους, σκέψη χειραφέτησης και δράσεις απελευθέρωσης, να συμμετάσχουμε στις κοινωνικές δομές του κινήματος, να σπάσουμε την απάθεια και την ιδιώτευση.

Τα χτυπήματα που θα καταφέρουμε εδώ στην Ελλάδα θα ακουστούν σε όλο τον κόσμο, από τις υπόλοιπες περιφέρειες έως την καρδιά των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών.

Μαζί, από όλες τις πλευρές του πλανήτη, να γίνουμε ακυβέρνητοι.

Για τον διεθνή συντονισμό και την παγκόσμια Αλληλεγγύη στον αγώνα ενάντια στο κράτος και τον παγκόσμιο καπιταλισμό.

Για την Αναρχία, την αέναη επανεφεύρεση των σχέσεών μας με σκοπό την άσκηση της ελευθερίας

Για την Ελευθερία, τη συλλογική ικανότητα να εκπληρώσουμε τις τεράστιες δυνατότητές μας με τους δικούς μας όρους

Κοινή διεθνής ανακοίνωση
Κενό Δίκτυο [Θεωρία, Ουτοπία, Συναίσθηση, Εφήμερες Τέχνες] / Αθήνα
και Crimethinc Ex Workers Collective (USA)

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The particular understanding I have of men and myself comes from having been born into a working poor context that also happened to be hyper religious.
My marinovio texted me today and said: “I am going out with a friend this upcoming weekend.” This was an FYI text; it was open and clean communication. This was the relationship I signed up for … yet in the back of mind crept up this insecurity that comes from having been born female, poor, brown, and brought up extraordinarily religious—and not just any religion, but charismatic Christian.
When I read this text, the side of me that intentionally picked this man to be my partner, trusted and knew everything was on the up-and-up. Yet the side of me that is insecure about myself, only in so far as I am attached to a man, grew anxious within seconds. That side of me said: aseguraté that nothing is sketchy, and that he is being good to you. As if some way, some how, it is my responsibility to keep my man’s interest on me.

Mi vida entera I have been told, through some indirect or direct way, that a man would be my salvation. And when that feels at risk, I have a powerfully internal response that on the surface looks like insecurities, but deep down inside it is actually rooted in colonialism and sexism. This particular understanding I have of men and myself comes from having been born into a working poor context that also happened to be hyper religious.

Christianity has and always will be externally brought into our communities, by white voluntourists and missionaries with all the privilege of being able to fly in and out of our countries at their leisure. Missionaries were never meant to come into our context and embrace our cultures and somehow use that to elevate their own religions. Instead missionaries have a reputation for going into places and erasing entire cultures for the sake of the mission of the church. The church came into our countries on assumptions of saving us even back when we were not devoid of a spirituality just devoid of THEIR spirituality. The church was never trying to come and save us, they were actually just trying to civilize us.
So when whitewashed Christianity rears its head in our communities it looks a lot like oppression, when you are brown and poor, because this mainstream theology just tells you to trust in God and that whatever you were doing before your salvation was wrong. This all feels particularly suffocating when you’re at the crux of having been born brown, poor, AND female. Because the church also teaches you mainstream theology that does not care to understand your context, but also that you are nothing without a man.

Give me a list of strong, independent, unwed (or devoid of male support) women in the Bible, and I will give you a million dollars. So when these problematic theologies came into our countries what they taught us is that women are in danger, every second that they are unwed and lacking male support.
So here I am, a strong independent Latina immigrant writing about the ills of colonialism, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, classism, and xenophobia and STILL when my novio says he will be out on a Saturday, I revert to Christianized pastor’s daughter Priscila that was indoctrinated into thinking that a man is her only hope. And then I do this weird dance of reminding myself that I am enough.

I do this interesting little self-talk, where I pull up screenshots of readers emails, scroll through some of my favorite works, and remember that I, and my hermanas, are all I have ever needed. I do this dance of reclaiming myself because I was not born with these inclinations to think of myself as inferior without a man, I was taught this, and so when I reclaim myself I am trying to erase years of propaganda to remind myself that I am enough. I do this dance of forgetting that a man will save me, despite a religion that taught me that a man came down and saved the entire human race. I do this dance of looking at myself in the mirror, and loving who I have become despite men.

Growing up in a country where foreign religious agendas trumped all human dignity of Indigenous persons already living in said country means that the great-great-great-granddaughters of rape, genocide, and theft were inherited colonizing outlooks about our bodies and ourselves. Growing up in a country where foreign policies have allowed the forced removal of our rich resources for the betterment of more deserving countries aka whiter richer countries, means that you begin to think that you as a brown woman are not enough. That even when everything has been taken from you, and then you’ve given the little that is left, you still find yourself doubting your resilience and your strength. Growing up in a country drenched with an externally imposed religion that justifies the mistreatment of women, you begin to start blaming those external forces for your country’s distress. All of this feels particularly suffocating when you’re at the crux of having been born brown, poor, AND female.

Christianity has everything to do with colonialism, and sexism has everything to do with Christianity.

Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez is a writer, blogger and founder of Latina Rebels.

source: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Christianity-Colonialism-and-Sexism-20160809-0020.html

The post Christianity, Colonialism, and Sexism – Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez appeared first on Void Network.