No crystal ball could have predicted that three years later, the example they set would lead to the wholesale arson of Nepal’s government buildings, its parliament, and supreme court. Nepal’s Gen Z hurricane-force uprising makes Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (The Struggle) appear tranquil, even moderate, although at the time the Rajapaksa family were so frightened by protesters that both prime minister Mahinda and his brother, president Gotabaya, went into hiding, the former on an isolated naval base, the latter on a naval vessel.

The term ‘economic crisis’ does not do justice to the indignities Sri Lankans suffered in 2022. Daily blackouts, fuel shortages, high unemployment and debilitating inflation–to say nothing of food shortages–plagued the nation at the same time as the elite enjoyed multiple luxury estates, staffed by servants even when their bosses were away for days at a time. Is it any wonder that young people screamed ‘Go Home Rajapaksas!’ and ‘Go Home Gota!’ As the movement built its momentum, their refrain became ‘Victory to the Struggle!’ (Aragalayata Jaya Wewa), showing how a revolt against perceived injustices was transformed into a revolutionary desire for a new reality.

Little did it matter that two decades previously, scarcely half the country had electricity, that schools, jobs, and basic healthcare had been largely unavailable. The growing gap between young people’s expectations in 2022 collided with the deadly misery crafted by elite politicians until an explosion was the only rational solution. Silent candlelight vigils overnight turned into hundreds of people swarming the president’s house on March 31, 2022. What had been a peaceful, spontaneous protest was then attacked by police firing tear gas and water cannons. The next morning, the president released a statement declaring that ‘extremist’ elements were trying to import the ‘Arab Spring’ to Colombo. The government declared a ‘state of emergency’ and mobilized the military and police to defy constitutional protections of free speech and assembly. Pro-Rajapaksa forces attacked young protesters, leading to a chain reaction of retaliations, a spiral of violence that engulfed even the homes and offices of the rich and powerful. Fishers, cricketers, carpenters and contingents of women all joined students in the protests. Even a nightly curfew and brief social media blackout failed to stop the movement.

Occupation of the Galle Face Green provided protesters with a 24/7 base of operations. The government countered with a mobile phone signal jammer, hoping to isolate resistance, but people refused to back down until the president resigned. Similar to Occupy Wall Street camps, the occupation of Galle Face swelled in both services it provided and supporters who rallied to the cause. Celebrities arrived to serenade the beleaguered demonstrators. By the end of the month, more than 1,000 unions staged a one-day support strike. Led by university students, people surrounded parliament and demanded resignation of all members as well as for the Rajapaksa clan to return their stolen money. “This is our country, not your ATM!’ was one of many placards.

On May 9, Mahinda Rajapaksa organized his supporters to massively assault the Galle Face Green. As police watched, more than one hundred people were beaten so badly they required hospitalization. The attackers’ brutality immediately turned the country against ‘state sponsored terrorism.’ That very same day, Mahinda was compelled to resign as prime minister. Riots against Rajapaksa loyalists proliferated. Many of the buses that carried the mob to attack Galle Face were torched. Politicians who supported Rajapaksa’s attack were beaten on the streets, and more than a few of their homes were torched. Insurgents’ violence was well targeted. They burnt to the ground the home of Sanath Nishantha, the man who had led the attack on Galle Face. The Rajapaksa museum was torched, a statue of the brothers’ father was destroyed, and two family homes were destroyed. A family-owned hotel was burnt along with a Lamborghini, a Hummer, a Cadillac and Ferrari parked there. When it was thought that Mahinda was hiding at the Trincomalee naval base, people surrounded it and demanded that he be arrested. To stop the escalating retaliations, president Gotabaya Rajapaksa ordered the military to take charge of the streets with ‘shoot on sight’ orders and authorization to detain people for 24-hours.

Two months of ongoing protests and repression culminated on July 9. After protesters began to surround his house, president Gota fled on an Air Force jet to the Maldives, later to Singapore. People swarmed the president’s residence and made it into an open house for days. Security forces enjoyed taking selfies along with thousands of citizens who came to marvel at the luxurious home. The presidential secretariat, the prime minister’s official residence as well as his private home were all occupied. Two weeks of uncertainty ended on July 13 when thousands of soldiers and police stormed Galle Face in a pre-dawn raid to close the camp. The occupied buildings were next.

Although ‘order’ had been restored by the military, protesters won their main demand, removal of the president, who fled along with more than dozen other clan members. By November, lines for gas and fuel all but disappeared, inflation cooled, and citizens enjoyed the satisfaction of having broken the Rajapaksas’ grip on power. Today, the nation continues to struggle with the legacy of Rajapaksa pillaging of state coffers.

No knew it at the time, but by massively confronting its corrupt and power-hungry elite and forcing them from power, Sri Lanka’s heroic populace set an example that would be followed within years. The recent synchronization of revolts in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal reveals a phenomenon I named the ‘Eros effect’ to understand the global proliferation of revolutionary movements in 1968. Since then, other instances of simultaneous protests are evident in the global disarmament movement of the early 1980s, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the alterglobalization insurgencies from the Zapatistas to Seattle, and most importantly, although less well-known, the chain reaction of Asian uprisings in the Philippines (1986), South Korea (1987), Burma (1988), Tibet, Taiwan, and China (1989), Nepal and Bangladesh (1990) and Thailand (1992).

The example set in 2022 by The Struggle in Sri Lanka prefigured subsequent uprisings in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal. They all contained surprisingly similar characteristics. None involved centralized leadership nor involved traditional political parties. All had students at their centers. Each erupted suddenly, without governments’ having a clue about the turmoil ahead. Each targeted leading politicians’ homes and offices. All targeted ostensibly ‘democratic’ regimes that failed to offer any avenue for popular participation other than street protests. Their spontaneous emergence and the success of anti-corruption uprisings have put entrenched elites everywhere on notice. ‘Behave well or you may be next!’

____

* George Katsiaficas is the author Asia’s Unknown Uprisings. He is a retired professor from Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. His web site is www.eroseffect.com

The post Sri Lankan Youth: Look What You’ve Started!- George Katsiafikas appeared first on Void Network.

On July 23, 2022, the military in Myanmar secretly executed four leaders of the country’s freedom movement. The martyrs’ families, like the men themselves, were not given advance notice. Final goodbyes were never said. Only after the dictatorship publicly announced the hangings two days later, on Monday, July 25, did the families and the world learn about these cold-blooded murders. To add to the pain, the remains of the deceased have disappeared.

The regime is being as brutal as possible in order to make clear that opposition to their rule will result in maximum pain and suffering. Among those killed were some of the most loved and popular leaders of the ongoing movement to overthrow the dictatorship: hip hop artist and elected parliamentary representative, Phyo Zeya Tha, leader of Generation Wave that followed the 2007 Saffron Revolution; Hla Myo Aung;  Aung Thura Zaw; and Kyaw Min Yu—better known to his friends, among whom I count myself, as Jimmy.

Jimmy was the pride of “the 8888 generation.” At precisely 8:08 am on August 8, 1988,  a synchronized and coordinated nationwide uprising broke out  and established a de facto government. Neighborhoods governed themselves, students directed traffic, and councils comprised mainly of monks and students served as judges and peaceful arbiters of disputes. A general strike shut down the economy. But the military struck back with an iron fist,thousands of people were killed, and even more arrested.For weeks, the military roamed the country, arbitrarily murdering activists, until the general strike collapsed on October 3.

Having survived the massacres, Jimmy counted himself among the “lucky ones.”Along with thousands of other courageous souls, he was imprisoned for years. Released in 2003, after democracy had been temporarily restored,Jimmy was sentenced to another five years in prison in 2007 for leading protests against fuel price hikes. He was released in 2012 as part of a mass pardon, and we met the following year. Despite having spent nearly 20 years in prison, he exuded happiness and confidence. When he walked smiling down the street, strangers bowed with respect and admiration. His colleagues treated him with affectionate attentiveness.

I asked him how it was possible that, unlike so many others whom I’ve known that had spent years in prison, he was able to emerge with such dignity and ebullience. His smile broadened as hereplied, “You must understand. Yes, we were the ones sentenced to prison, but the warden had to ask me and my colleagues if he wanted anything done.The prisoners all respected and listened only to us. Inside the prisons we had the power, and the warden was our servant who carried out tasks we assigned him. Actually, we felt pity for the warden,” he grinned.“ Continuing in a more sober tone, he told me that poems written to him almost daily by his wife, who was also imprisoned, had sustained his emotional well-being.

Jimmy chose his nickname because of his admiration for the human rights policy of US President Jimmy Carter. He and I had more than one go round about this!  Our many laughing banters back and forth saw him chiding me for not accepting that the US could play a progressive role in the world, while I brought up the Carter administration’s bloody suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, secret support for Pol Pot, and stepped up military aid to Indonesia after the genocide in East Timor. Jimmy jokingly announced to his colleagues that I was the enemy of my own government, which they regarded as a friend.

How ironic that the country Jimmy admired is doing so little for the democratic aspirations of the people he died for.  The U.S., unlike the  European Union, has yet to recognize the National Unity Government (NUG) made up of elected officials overthrown by the military junta that’s now refusing to give Jimmy’s family his ashes. 

When I probed Jimmy’s loyalty to Aung San Sui Kyi, he stated simply that she was the leader chosen by the people, that he would follow her as long as her leadership was popularly accepted.  Today it is the NUG and its armed wing – the People’s Defense Forces – that represent the popular will of the people of Myanmar.

At our finalface to face meeting, he came to my hotel to give me a copy of his wife’s poemsthat had just been published as a book. Even though it was in Burmese and I could not read a word of it, his gift and kind inscription touched me greatly.

Jimmy was arrested for the final time on October 23, 2021, eight months after the military again overthrew a constitutionally elected government. In January of this year, he was sentenced to death along with more than one hundred others, but few believed the sentences would be carried out. Capital punishment had not been used in his country for more than three decades.

Since learning about his execution, I haven’t been able to talk much. I’ve lost loved ones and friends to diseases including AIDS and drugs and violence. Unjust state-sponsored execution is probably the very hardest category of death to come to terms with. I alternate between burning anger and deep grief but I know what direction Jimmy would tell me to take, activism to continue the struggle for which he paid the ultimate price.

________

August 1, 2022, Oakland, California

George Katsiaficas is author of Asia’s Unknown Uprisings.

The post Rest in Peace “Jimmy” Kyaw Min Yu- by George Katsiaficas appeared first on Void Network.

From the 2005 French riots in the suburbs of Paris and all over France until the Greek social revolt from 2008 to 2012, from the Tunisian and Libyan social explosions, the Tahrir square revolt, the indignados movement in Spain and Gezi Park in Turkey, from the panamerican Occupy movement to the riots of Ferguson and Baltimore none of these revolts led to a revolutionary change of organisation of the economy and social life.

A series of insurrections prepares and brings us closer to a revolutionary change. But we have yet to answer the questions: What could revolution in the 21st century be? How can we create a common ground so to prepare it?

Personally speaking, I don’t see a revolution coming in the near future and I wonder why, especially in this historical period of savage capitalism. All of us—men and women, intersexes and transexuals, gays and lesbians, don’t want to hazard the comfort and safety that capitalism offers us. Why? Because we are afraid of radical change in our lives. There are limitations, dividing lines in the society –  and the individual persons who compose society refuse to overcome the economic, the social and the cultural web of the current societies. These limitations are solid and massive constraints as they have been constructed from the 16^th century – the era of agrarian capitalism  – until today’s neoliberalism. It is difficult to smash them, to dream even that we can smash them as inside these limitations many of our dreams and desires have taken a form—unfortunately a form which is produced only by the means of money and hierarchy, work and repression.

What are these limitations? The acceptance of the established reality. The established reality of the neoliberal society, its comforts, its anxieties and its misery. The established reality of a society where inequality is important and useful for its economical development. The established reality of the conservative way of thinking and living where freedom is welcome in shop therapy, in short holidays in the Alps, in a drunk Saturday, in a concert of a new band for hipster bourgeois kids uninterested in the political becoming.

It is easier to support the dominant absurdity of commercialized human life. You know what it is, you know your place inside this world, even if you are not satisfied you know how to move around, how to get what you need, how to find what you are searching for.You are searching for normality.

The revolts of our era need to deny the putrid feelings that prevent and embarrass our deepest desires for freedom and celebration of life. The presupposed predetermination of austerity, unhappiness, anxiety, self-destruction and wickedness, weakens the people’s dream to be happy and self-complete or manipulate the human desires into already established exploitative forms. The pursuit of happiness that is claimed by everyone must destroy the spectacle, the plastic needs, the synthetic misery and the stupid world of hobbies and obligations.

There are thousands of people watching the decay of happiness in terms of a lack of healthy relationships, lack of social solidarity, mutuality, freedom of expression, and even a lack of every-day existential experience of human love. People watch the abysmal darkness of obligatory monogamy creating relationships based on lies and doubts, the lust for money and the lust for authority that drive society to debt, austerity, enslavement, depression and pessimism. The same persons who desire revolution and social justice, the people who cry for the dead Palestinians, for the poor people in Africa, for the homeless people in Athens and New York or who feel angry about the economic exploitation by the IMF, still they believe that nothing can happen, nothing can really change. They believe that the big demonstrations, the riots, the counter-propaganda cannot influence the political decisions or even reach the rest of the society, that all the strategies of the radicals and the methodologies of the insurgents are dead ends unable to bring any serious improvement to our daily life. This contradistinction inside each one of us restores and re-establishes normality.

The domination of the state and established economy functions deeply inside the human mind. On the other hand, the desire for freedom is hidden everywhere in the mind and in the human body. How can we energize this desire and metamorphose it into a war machine?

There are people who are working and living as uniformed robots without wondering about the meaning of existence and how neoliberalism and capitalism function in their own lives. They are satisfied with their lives even if for the last 4-5 years they have been obliged to drag the banking debt of all Europe inside their sleeping pills and their anti-psychotic medication. The antidote of life’s deficit is to explore and discover life’s real wealth, the wealth of enjoyment, of creativity, of sharing, of love, of emancipated relations beyond and without property, money and success. What are we going to say to all these people? How will these people gather in the streets and how will they find answers for their questions? How have they chosen this life? There is also one more question. Which ethos and morality inspire life? I don’t refer to the bourgeois habits and be haviours. The wave of the insurrection will swallow them.

All these people are socially isolated. The people blame themselves for their psychological and economical situation without understanding the social causes of these problems and they feel inadequate because the difficulties that they face in everyday life are visible at an individual, psychological level – then – they behave as contemporary slaves who are working hard, helping the system to function because they believe that they owe  the system – they owe the government- their own life. People feel alone and unable to live their lives based on self-organized structures, revolutionary plans, egalitarian social projects and propositions. People around us deny the possibilities of success of self-organization and our propositions for abolishing the state – state and capital became the only possible mechanisms of human progress, social evolution and human life. We need a new social – political spirit, an existential power that is capable of cultivating and expanding our thoughts and practices. How can we re-appropriate  the scientific conclusions and the tools of technology to transform our curiosity, our ignorance, and our fears into liberated desires and new forms of living experiences?

The political anarchist movements, the anarchist collectives, the autonomous political and social organizations and the individual anarchists should be very careful and serious in front of the open eyes of the society. The people are not stupid, the people are feeling fear of change but societies are always in search of new practical solutions and open possibilities. Many arguments between activists and people who participate in various social movements open a discussion about the lack of a clear and concrete goal of the anarchists and practical ways to achieve that. We can’t change a society by pursuing goals that are vague or abstract. “Freedom” by itself cannot serve as a goal, because different people have different conceptions of what constitutes freedom and of the relative importance of different aspects of freedom. The same is true of other abstract ideas such as equality, mutuality and self-organization. The movement needs clear and concrete goals, so that everyone involved will have approximately the same understanding of what our goals and solutions actually are. It seems that the movement’s original goals may become blurred if not completed perverted. The unique solid base is everyday human life as we imagine it, as we want it and as it is. This is the unique criterion that can be used to orient us and to prevent emancipatory concepts from becoming abstract meanings cut off from the existential experience of our every-day life.

Once a revolt becomes powerful enough to achieve its objectives, it should achieve its objectives as soon as possible before the participants get tired and return to their standard lives and their safe apartments. When an objective is vague or abstract, it is too easy to pretend that the objective has been achieved or that progress toward it is being made, when real achievements are minimal, when nothing really changed. The building of a new society and its social structures is endless.     We need to devote our personal time to build new structures through mutuality and non-hierarchy. Which are these structures – specifically which are these “counter-structures”?  And why do we need “counter-structures” rather than abstract ideas? Because it is a matter of common, everyday experience to change people’s behavior – people’s habits. Did the revolts of our era produce important, lasting changes in human behavior and experience of every-day life?

The power-structure of modern society stabilizes and changes human behavior through the mass media with the help of police, academics and skilled professional propagandists. A kind of information via mass media has been used to besot the youth to crawl with a sentiment of resignation. The ambiguity of corporate information and commercial massive entertainment events deceive and usurp the richness of knowledge. The revolts of our era are also against these personas that the society of the spectacle produces endlessly, against the ethos of the spectacle and against the celebrities of pop culture, the commerce and the businesses of capitalism. The aim of this endless process of assimilation of any kind of human activity by the spectacle is to praise the absence of personal cultivation, to ostracise literature and poetry, to manipulate emotional education, to bury the willingness for adventure under the violence of social vagrancy, to turn love into porn, revolt into hooliganism, spirituality into religion, psychotropic experimentation into drug addiction, creativity into art industry, desire for knowledge into academic authority, need for participation into the apathy of representation. Personal cultivation  is worthless to the market.

A self-determined group of committed and intelligent revolutionaries  outside the established power structures can transform human ambitions through counter-culture , counter-propaganda and actions but only if that group is powerful enough to undertake a massive propagation of a real transformation of needs and desires, a transformation of the meaning of life and of what living is worth.

Even where human life is constructed and controlled by professional propagandists of established reality, however, that conditioning in not permanent. The established conditioning is reversed when the capitalist propaganda ceases in moments of social crises or when the established manipulation of opinion is replaced by massive counter-culture and counter-propaganda that promotes contrary ideas and practices which can be attractive simultaneously to adventurers and shy people, to intellectuals and hooligans, to sexy girls and digi-nerds, to unemployed and workaholics, ideas and practices that brings life much further than the limitations of established reality and humans much further than the limitations of established social identities. Destroy the established reality! This is always possible. Don’t be afraid to take this step!

The changes that we want to create will sustain and develop with further effort on the part of the movement. This effort emanates from a philosophical search and arrives at a solid social structure of real life solidarity, total freedom, critical thought, constant free distribution of products, education, health care. While both ideas and organization for practical action are necessary components of any rational and successful effort to change a society, the people who fight for practical action need to be the same individuals as the theorists who develop and propagate the ideas. Both the theory and action should walk together so that the “theoretician” and “activist” live together in the same body. We must break the established separations.

Sometimes people are afraid of revolution, even those who consider themselves revolutionaries. Because they are going to lose something. Because during the time of a big revolution, they think that they are going to lose the stability of their everyday life – their houses, their money, their jobs, their small little worlds, their secret private normalities. If we look back at history, the big revolts and the revolutions happened because the people did not have something to lose, or it had already been taken from them. There is inside all of us a whole world of necessities and certainties that we have to demolish and bring down for the grace of the emancipated humanity. There is a wall around us and in between us that is covered with advertisements, luxuries, fashion and celebrities that we have to bring down. Bring down the wall of the spectacle!

 Inspired by the article “Eight Theses on the Affective Structure of the Present Conjuncture” by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desired Armed no.75 we can affirm that the dominant system has a dominant way to answer the resistances of each era. So, this time the resistance needs strategies to dissolve the assimilation of the dominant system. The first wave of social movement was a blow against misery.  Working conditions became better and capitalism offered a rich life with open possibilities and access to merchandises. Many cars, many shampoos, many loans, many credit cards. The movement’s tactic of the sixties and seventies or even up to the present days are based on ways to escape from capitalistic normality. Situationists pioneered a whole series of tactics directed against boredom.

On the other hand the millennium is an era of global anxiety. We fight boredom with sabotage,  reclaim public space, DIY culture, free festivals, hacker culture, lessons of collective orgasm. Contemporary savage capitalism offered us an escape from  boredom – The Anxiety – “I am too busy”, “I don’t have time to meet with my friends”, “Ι don’t know what will happen to me tomorrow”, people cannot make longterm plans anymore, they avoid making commitments and promises, everything is ephemeral and instability is the new social contract. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, enjoyment are now laced with anxiety.

Wherever you stand in every place on earth, you are a receiver or a transmitter of a universal anxiety. Anxiety to be successful, to be beautiful, to be thin, to pay the house loans, to not be fired from your job, to sustain your family and your marriage, to avoid having a certain future because of the austerity measure, to survive day by day in a social environment of instability, intense antagonism and insecurity.

Our desires are stretched and manipulated by capitalism. Our desires are lead into stupidity.

The mass media, the amusement industry and mass culture turn all our needs and all our desires into merchandise. The different forms of conservatism of established religion are selling psychological stability through different forms of delusion. Catholicism, Puritanism, Protestantism, Orthodox church, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism destroy our spirituality.

In a period of social instability all forms of established reality (state, market, academia, religion, law, banking system, mass culture) are re-appearing as guarantors of normality promising social stability even though they are the causes of global anxiety.

The luxury of stupidity creates apathy, loneliness, dominant behavior, jealousy, hate, possessiveness, ignorance, attachment, greed, aversion and exploitation. The stupidity is seen in the absence of critical thought: you are living somewhere that you didn’t choose in a way you don’t understand the workings of, nor the reasons for the things that are happening to you. The stupidity is seen in the mechanical re-production of the same personalities, the same choices and the same decisions.

There is an increase of unimportance that spreads all around the world through anxiety and constructs the established authority. The exaltation of modesty is always a privilege of the ruling class. Modesty and resentfulness are best friends in our days. The repressed desires, the depressed hidden feelings, your personal guilt for the failure of not being rich and famous and rich, the compulsion of work, the power of the verb “having” instead of “being” are millennium stars sparkling in the mud of apathy, coldness, hysteria and disappointment.

The revolutionary powers are the powers of Eros. The power of the state is the death of the anarchist desires for freedom of mankind. The path from controlled to uncontrolled desires is the situation where the people can experience their passions at their Zenith.

In the era of contemporary totalitarianism, the passions can endanger or destroy the relationships even of emancipated persons. Sex, drugs, free love, enjoyment, dancing, travelling, poetry, art, insurrection,  creativity, refusal of wage slavery, BDSM, gender experimentation, neo-nomadism, collective life, polygamy, squatting, guerrilla struggle, political agitation, group sex or riot can be emancipatory and in the same moment psychologically and existentially destructive for the person.

But there is always the possibility of  situations where these same passions would not destroy the person but emancipate him or her from the morality of Christianity, the morality of conservatism, the morality of capitalism. We must be aware of both the limitations and the powers of our own passions.

The I, the self, is already designed to function inside a specific social organization. This social structure reproduces itself through the internalization of the order that created the structure.

Situations where the passions expand and revolt against the establishment are also bound themselves to the existing order. The people who create and participate in the revolutionary situations need to be able to create their own orders far from the dominant civilization.

The revolutionary passions ought to stem from a whole social -political movement that includes all the human activities in everyday life.

Society is always pushing you to turn into something other than what you want to be. Society attempts to make you someone else, a copy, a simulacrum. It is necessary to realize that we are not here to fulfill the expectations of anyone else. It is safer to follow society, the priests, the politicians, the teachers because society does not create problems for you when you ‘re with it. But it is dangerous to follow yourself because society will not be there to support you.We need to search, to understand, to analyze the social conditions in order to offer the benefit of Anarchy to humanity. The imposed obligations constitute a strategy of priests, teachers, politicians, economists, bankers, businessmen and policemen in order to control your desires, in order to keep humanity enslaved forever. They destroy your capacity to live, to love, to delight. There is a secret. If you can make humanity feel guilty, you remain strong. The culprit is always ready to serve the strong . The culprit does not have enough courage and passion to be a rebel, that’s the secret. Only a passionate human being can be revolutionary. As member of Void Network I can say that we want to create spaces of emancipation, situations of revolt, events of personal and collective enthusiasm so that the people feel empowered to collectively question their personal lives and fight to change the social relationships. We want to share the amazing passionate moments where the common people become revolutionary beings.  Our uprisings need to find a ground that can be a way against and beyond Western thinking, its anxieties and its comforts. We fight for radical social change, transformation of everyday life and the liberation of the existential experience of human being.

 Sissy Doutsiou / Void Network – Athens 

https://voidnetwork.gr

Sissy Doutsiou is a poet, actress and activist. She is co-founder of the Institute for Experimental Arts and member of Void Network from 2004. Read also “The Limitations of Antisexism”, another essay of her that you can find at the book “We Are an Image from the Future- The Greek Revolt of December 2008” (AK Press 2010) You can read the essay here: https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-admin/post.php?post=5917&action=edit

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Eros Effect:
People Power and People’s Uprisings

an introductive video by George Katsiaficas*

From 1968 to the East Asian Uprisings of the 1980s and 1990s (Gwangju, South Korea in particular) a new type of popular uprising has appeared. Often dubbed “people power” these protests reveal how thousands of ordinary people, acting together in the streets, exhibit an intelligence far greater than elites which today rule over nation-states and international economic institutions. While our elites make wars and preside over a world system in which millions starve to death, ordinary citizens seek to create a world of peace and security. A global uprising against war and neoliberalism could help create a world based on human Love for each other–Eros.

you can see the video full screen here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=240945485861016019&hl=en#

for further reading on Eros Effect and People’s Power please navigate in the important essay “The Eros Effect” by George Katsiaficas : http://www.eroseffect.com/articles/eroseffectpaper.PDF

Navigate also to the site of George Katsiaficas:
http://www.eroseffect.com/

* George Katsiaficas, a student of Herbert Marcuse, and long-time activist, he is the author of The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. His book, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. Among his edited volumes are Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party (with Kathleen Cleaver) and Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese Views of the War. George Katsiaficas is currently living in Gwangju, South Korea. A visiting professor of sociology at Chonnam National University, he is finishing research on East Asian uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s.

The post Eros Effect: People Power and The People’s Uprisisngs / an introductive video and an essay by George Katsiaficas appeared first on Void Network.