__

Generation Z was born into the digital age, and the internet has been part of their lives since day one. For this reason, Gen Z is also called the “digital Generation.” Although they have certain widely accepted general characteristics, attempting to describe them through rigid stereotypes can be misleading. Definitions that portray Gen Z solely as a group that only communicates digitally are deceptive. This generation resembles a volcanic mountain ready to erupt, with an unpredictability about when it will spring into action. That observation can be observed in the powerful actions they have already carried out around the world. They have toppled three regimes in Asia and one in both Europe and Africa. In more than 20 other countries, they have compelled governments to reform.

The superficial analyses of Gen Z produced by groups that benefit from the capitalist system—claiming that “Gen Z is individualistic,” “Gen Z is financially oriented,” that they are a “lost generation”—serve no purpose other than attempting to shape and control the new generation, just as has been done with every previous one. We must pay close attention to this. No system wants the incoming generation to disrupt its “tranquil” domination. To prevent this, it creates its own experts and academics who spread theories that discredit Gen Z, while waging special warfare through mindless Tik Tok videos, “realistic” video war games, hard drugs, and other means targeted specifically at young people to blunt their revolutionary edge.

The capitalist definitions of Gen Z reveal cynicism and fears, but many more people greet Gen Z with open arms. Decades of past struggles produced visionaries who welcome Gen Z’s energies and actions.

Characteristics and Shortcomings of Gen Z Actions

Perhaps the most important feature of Gen Z is its ability to organize extremely quickly through digital media and simultaneously to turn organization into action. Globalizing solidarity networks in a very short time, especially in many parts of Asia and the Middle East, they display fearless resistance against entrenched politicians. Unlike previous Gens, Gen Z has no single leader. They organize horizontally. Their leaderless structure makes them appear strategy-less, unplanned, and scattered, which limits their ability to achieve lasting results. Because they lack self-defense planning, they often face extreme violence. When the government changes or when the issues they protest are addressed, their dissent subsides. While a few individuals step up to exert political influence, Gen Z as a group has not generally offered alternative models for qualitative change. In Bangladesh and Nepal, a Nobel Prize winning economist and a former Chief Judge were accepted to lead interim governments. In the next part of this article, I consider the free territory in Rojava, Syria  as a genuine alternative to nation-states based upon capitalist partiarchy.

Gen Z has already proven its fearlessness by challenging governments despite enormous state violence. They have paid a high price: more than 2,000 insurgents have been killed and thousands more wounded. The most important task now standing before us is to create a livable alternative, to move from rebellion to revolution. Whenever insurgencies compel governments to retreat or reform, similar regimes inevitably return. Over time they develop corrupt and  anti-democratic practices. For Gen Z’s struggles to truly transcend capitalist modernity, it is crucial to have an alternative model of life. Anarchism, feminism, national liberation movements, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and previous episodes of class struggles have created a tremendously important history of resistance. Yet Gen Z — one of the major forces of resistance in the new century — needs a 21st Century orientation to make their gains permanent and sustainable. One-dimensional or ideologically “correct” perspectives fragment the movement rather than creating the necessary transformation of existing systems. Facing a multitude of problems, Gen Z needs a holistic system that can shed light on all problems and develop collective solutions.

It is vitally important that Gen Z develops a perspective that takes women’s liberation, class consciousness, grassroots democracy, and an ecological worldview as its foundations. Today, many left and socialist movements lack a strategic approach to women’s liberation. Without resolving patriarchal oppression, no radical solution is possible. Similarly, ecology either has no place or only a very limited place in the ideology of many organizations, even though the pollution and gradual destruction of nature is currently one of the world’s most critical problems.

Against capitalism’s effort to create an individualistic society in which people stay away from social issues and focus on “individual” problems, Gen Z can overcome incessant capitalist assaults by building its own communal culture. To do so requires a radical break from customary everyday life. If Gen Z truly wants a freer society, it must begin with itself. To do that, a radical rupture from the life offered by capitalist modernity is necessary. We must take a stand against the system’s materialist personalities and imposed gluttonous consumer habits, and we must overcome the values that treat women merely as commodities.

Gen Z’s Alternative in Rojava

Since 2012, diverse peoples from northern and eastern Syria have come together in Rojava to build exactly the kind of society we need. Although it began as a Kurdish majority region, today Rojava contains a mix of Muslim Kurds, Syrian Christians, Assyrian Christians, Armenian Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen, Muslim Chechens and even atheists. A total of around three million people live harmoniously within a political framework that strives to ensure everyone’s rights are protected, women have equal representation in all organizations, and ecology is a basic principle. 

An estimated 40 to 50 million Kurds in the world are divided by Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Although they lack a nation-state, Kurds have built a variety of political organizations in the four countries where they live. Creatively navigating an international constellation of forces seeking to control them, Kurds became the main ally of all forces who oppose the Islamic State (ISIS). In a region where despotic dictatorships and religious exclusivity reign, Kurds provide a refreshing alternative of diversity, tolerance and free association.

The Rojava Revolution has emerged as an alternative organizational model to nation-states. The Rojava experience is the concrete embodiment of “Democratic Confederalism” — the democratic, women-liberationist, and ecological paradigm developed by the leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan. This system embodies the paradigm of freedom in an alternative in every aspect of life. Youth, women, all religions, and all languages are free to organize in their own specific ways and live together freely. Although Öcalan and the PKK originally fought for a nation-state, today they have changed both tactics and that goal: they believe in creating liberated democratic confederations similar to the Zapatista caracoles in which people can live freely.

Nation-states are fundamentally militaristic, nationalist, sexist, and religious. Governments have made people dependent on the state in matters of security, administration, and basic needs such as water and food. Democratic confederalism is an alternative created to oppose dependency, and it is an alternative to the nation-state itself. The goal of this system is the liberation of economy, culture, politics, and every dimension of social life—and to develop necessary self-defense to protect hard-won freedoms. The basic organizational forms of confederalism are academies, cooperatives, assemblies, and communes.

Academies play a strategic role in the formation of the educational system. Cooperatives in which members share responsibilities and reap the products of their labor is another fundamental organizational tool to protect society from giant monopolies and establish enterprises owned communally. People have organized themselves into communes and assemblies in every city, every village, and every neighborhood to solve their own problems together in solidarity with one another.

Nation-states monopolize all means of defense in order to control society. That is why self-defense is one of the foundational elements of democratic confederalism. All civilian and political organizations are built from the grassroots. Over more than  a decade of repelling attacks by ISIS and other Islamists as well as Erdogan’s Turkish army and air force,  more than 11,000 Rojava communards have lost their lives. Many more Iraqi Kurds have also been killed by regimes there.

Internationalist revolutionary youth from many countries of the world (England, Spain, Italy, Greece, Germany, USA, and others) came to Rojava to embrace the Rojava revolution against the threat posed by ISIS. In 2015, the Internationalist Freedom Battalion was formed by Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and anarchist fighters from outside Syria. Beginning on June 10, 2015, they arrived to support the People’s Protection Units (YPG) against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in the Rojava War. Inspired by the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, at least 300 international fighters were also killed in the fighting. Most of the militias fought under the umbrella of the YPG before forming into other groups such as the Internationalist Freedom Battalion. Foreigners also helped to create the Rojava Information Center (https://rojavainformationcenter.org).

So, what is the history of the Rojava Revolution?

The Rojava Revolution

Just when Gen Z was being born, popular uprisings that began in Tunisia at the end of 2010, spontaneously spread across the Middle East, and became known as the “Arab Spring,” which reached Syria on 15 March 2011. The greatest success of the uprising that turned into a bloody civil war in Syria was the Rojava Revolution. Syrian Kurds neither took the side of the Baath regime nor the gangs formed against it. Choosing the Third Way, the Kurds led the “Spring of the Peoples” with the understanding of a “democratic nation.” Ultimately, they formed the basis of today’s Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

To demonstrate their determination for revolution, Syrian Kurds established the Democratic Society Movement (TEV-DEM) and the People’s Council of Western Kurdistan (MGRK) to form their own political unity in the face of attacks from both the regime and the forces described as “opposition.” Originally launched in northern and eastern Syria, Friday marches were held across the country. Following these protests, basic services previously run by the Assad regime were taken over by popular assemblies. In Afrin, language courses in Kurdish, a banned language in Turkey and Syria, were opened. For the first time, Kurdish children enrolled in primary and preparatory schools and received education in their own language.

The People Seize Power

On July 18, 2012, a meeting in Damascus, the capital of Syria, was attended by the heads of all major regime institutions. A massive explosion occurred, killing most officials. A day later, regime forces were driven out of Kobanê, led by Kurdish youth and with the participation of the people. Following Kobanê, the people seized power in Afrin, Serêkaniyê, Dirbêsiyê, Amûdê, Dêrik, Girkê Legê, Tirbêspiyê, and Til Temîr. On the same day, the Kurds declared a people’s government in Kobanê, which they named a canton, under the slogan “Democratic Syria, Autonomous Rojava.” July 19 became the starting date of the revolution. The declaration in Kobanê was followed by the declaration of new cantons in Afrin and Qamishli. As fighting intensified, people first formed local defense units and engaged in self-defense activities in the streets. Later, the YPG and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), were officially established, although their foundations were laid years earlier during the resistance against the Baath regime’s massacres.

The first step taken in 2012 in the liberated areas, cities, towns, and villages was the establishment of People’s Houses. Through meetings and training sessions, people fully grasped autonomous administration. Security emerged as a fundamental concern. On this basis, people began to establish a self-defense system after the first steps of forming small defense groups. Another important task was to improve relations between the region’s divided communities while also taking the first steps to strengthen women’s power and to provide services to all in need.

As People’s Houses stimulated grassroots actions, the shape of autonomous administration changed. People’s Houses evolved into broader communes. Thousands of communes were established in villages and neighborhoods. Under the umbrella of these communes, education, defense, health, economy, and social services were provided. Members received training to play active roles, and separate women’s and youth communes were also created. Communes soon transformed into broader organizational structures organized as assemblies. City, village, and neighborhood assemblies were formed, consisting of representatives from communes, political parties, and municipal service institutions. Neighborhood assemblies were merged into city assemblies, and similar steps were taken at district and town levels. In December 2013, the first conference of city, district, and town assemblies was held, and a co-chair system was adopted for assemblies and communes, according to which every assembly, commune, and institution would have one female and one male co-chair. This dealt a major blow to the male-dominated mindset that had ignored women for years. Young people have continually played a major role in expanding democracy in Rojava.

Joint struggles were waged to unite ethnic and religious groups in the region, and significant progress was made fighting the provocations of Nusra (an affiliate of Al-Qaeda). The ISIS attack on Kobanê in 2014 was defeated through the unity of all peoples, beliefs, and different ethnicities in Northern and Eastern Syria. Years of fighting galvanized military units and command structures. The creation of  joint administrations to establish a free and equal lives further strengthened the military forces under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). In Rojava, one observer noted “a novel synthesis, a militant vertical organization empowers a communal, horizontal politics.”[1]

After this revolutionary advance, education in peoples’ mother tongues was intensified. Approximately 100 schools were opened in the region, and approximately 1,000 teachers were trained. Significant research on regional culture was initiated. Cultural and artistic centers with music groups, folklore, theater, and children’s groups were established. Committees were established to meet the needs of the people and address social, legal, and economic issues. A “justice committee” was established as an alternative to the Syrian legal system. Furthermore, a “social justice department” was created within the Mesopotamian Academy of Social Sciences on April 4, 2013, to improve the legal system.

Women’s Organizations

Female combatants have been centrally important to the defense of Rojava. Active since the beginning of the revolution and organized under the name Yekîtiya Star,[2] they created women’s assemblies and women’s houses. Priority was given to women’s representation in people’s assemblies, and women’s science-education centers and academies were opened in many cities. Women took their places in all administrations under the co-chair system and played active roles in education, family, politics, economy, and public security through women’s institutions.

Due to embargoes imposed on the region, the population facing severe shortages of medicine, flour, fuel, and other daily needs. To organize aid coming from abroad, the Kurdish Red Crescent (Heyvâ Sor) was established to break the embargo, build a non-capitalist system, and solve daily problems. In 2013, the Economic Development Institution for North and East Syria was founded. Aiming to develop an economy based on the people, this institution gave priority to cooperatives, starting in Kobanê and Dêrik.

At the end of 2013, the autonomous administration system recognized Kurdish, Arabic, and Assyrian as official languages. Other linguistic constituencies were granted the right to learn their own languages. Women’s representation in institutions was set at a minimum of 40%, and the participation of all regional components built on three pillars: Legislative Assembly, Executive Council, and High Court. All this multi-ethnic diversity has provided challenges that demand compromises, such as reversing a ban on polygamy in Arab-majority regions. In the fight for Kobanê, the SDF agreed to accept the offer of US air cover.

Youth’s Ownership of the Rojava Revolution

The second Middle East Youth Conference was held in Kobanê on February 20, 2019. Organized under the slogan “Toward a colorful and democratic Middle East under the leadership of youth,” the conference hosted more than 300 delegates from the four parts of Kurdistan, as well as Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, Armenia, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Yemen, North Africa, and Sudan. The economic, political, and social crises in the region were discussed within the framework of capitalist modernity. In this context, solutions to the deadlock facing the Middle East were debated from fresh, youthful perspectives. At the end of the conference, steps were taken toward establishing a coordination council among youth organizations and developing joint political actions.

Led especially by Generation Z, young people organized the First World Youth Conference in Paris, France, between November 3–5, 2023. The conference brought together 400 delegates representing 95 youth organizations from 49 countries worldwide. Alongside participants from many European countries, young people from the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, Kenya, Mali, the United States, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador met with youth from the four parts of Kurdistan. The discussions and exchanges during the conference were strongly endorsed the demand for freedom of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan. The problems faced by revolutionary youth around the world were central to the agenda, emphasizing the importance of struggling together against the fragmentation created by the system. During the conference, solidarity was declared with all oppressed peoples, particularly the Palestinian people and the Kurdistan freedom movement. It was also stated that a common struggle would be carried out to protect the gains of peoples in Rojava and in many parts of the world.

Within the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, young people work in a distinctively autonomous manner. There is no imposition or top-down direction on youth councils or youth institutions in any field. Youth organizations determine their own forms of organization and modes of action. Education, organizational activities, as well as cultural and sports programs for young people are coordinated directly by youth councils themselves. As the pioneering and driving force of the revolution, youth take an active role in post-war reconstruction efforts, organize aid campaigns for those affected by war, and carry out support and play activities for children. Within the framework of women’s liberation, young people organize activities for November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, as well as marches, panels, and street actions on March 8, International Women’s Day. The struggle against patriarchal mentality stands at the center of youth work.

In the field of culture and arts, young people play an important role in preserving the cultures of peoples by organizing music and theater festivals that include all communities and cultures, as well as photography, cinema, and painting workshops. Youth also carry out significant activities on ecology by organizing meetings, actions, and events such as tree-planting campaigns and repairing damage caused to nature by war. Through the sports tournaments they organize, youth contribute to social solidarity and healthy living. In addition, by holding commemorative events on the anniversaries of massacres and attacks to honor those who lost their lives, youth take the lead in keeping social memory alive.

Ecology in Rojava 

Ecological work in Rojava faced significant obstacles in the implementation of many projects due to attacks from various jihadist groups and Turkey. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made in the ecological field. The first steps towards ecological production were taken by the village communes that began to form in 2012. In 2014, cooperatives were established to secure the food supply, and the first decisions were made to reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

The Ecology Committee was officially established in 2015, and local programs began to be developed. In 2016, a large-scale campaign aimed at planting hundreds of thousands of trees was launched. Starting in 2017, solar panel projects were developed to address power outages. Solar energy systems began to be installed at homes and cooperatives. In 2018, Jinwar, a women-run ecological village, was officially opened. This village is based on organic farming, natural building materials, solar energy, and collective living. In 2019, initiatives were launched to preserve local seeds and develop agricultural practices that reduce chemical use. Small-scale organic farming trials have begun. In 2020, campaigns against environmental pollution and waste management programs were launched. Local campaigns to reduce plastic use were also launched. The Keziyên Kesk (Green Braids) Initiative was established in September 2020 to combat the ongoing environmental destruction in North and East Syria and increase soil productivity. Its work aims to help the people of North and East Syria become more self-sufficient in agriculture, thereby strengthening their resilience to embargoes. In collaboration with the Ministry of Education in North and East Syria, it has ensured that every school has a teacher teaching social ecology. As part of the “Lungs of the Village” project, millions of saplings were planted, and teams visited villages to explain the ecological destruction and how it can be reversed. In 2021, following the region’s water crisis and the decline in the Euphrates River’s flow, an emergency ecological plan was developed. Turkey regularly disrupts the flow of the Euphrates River, posing a serious threat to the region. This impacts not only agricultural activities but also access to clean drinking water. In response, water conservation campaigns were conducted, alternative irrigation methods (drip irrigation and the use of recycled water) were promoted, and local water communes were established. Solar-powered irrigation systems were expanded, and organic agricultural production increased.

Approximately 500,000 hectares of land previously under the control of the Assad regime have been consolidated into public land. According to a report by the Public Land Administration dated December 20, 2023, approximately 80% of this land has been allocated to agricultural cooperatives, women’s institutions, families, forests/afforestation, parks, associations, and camps for internally displaced persons. Fifty per cent of the population’s vegetable needs are now met locally. Products are delivered directly to the public at fair prices through cooperatives. More than 140,000 fruit trees have been planted to increase fruit production. Production, processing, and distribution continue through cooperatives.

Rojava is now nearly self-sufficient olive oil production, along with wheat, flour, bulgur, pasta, and lentil processing facilities. The Economic and Agricultural Councils continue to work on sugar, sunflower, soybean, and cotton processing and textile production facilities. Significant progress has been made in dairy production through agricultural cooperatives; dairy processing facilities now produce cheese, yogurt, and butter. While Rojava fully meets its red meat needs, it has not yet achieved self-sufficiency in white meat. Ecological production principles continue to be implemented to secure the food supply for the people of North and East Syria.

Recognition of the Revolution

No UN member state has officially recognized Northern and Eastern Syria. However, in October 2021, the Catalan Parliament voted to officially recognize Northern and Eastern Syria. Catalonia thereby made history as the first parliament to recognize the Rojava Revolution. With this decision, Catalan MPs declared their friendship with the Kurdish people and their opposition to Turkey’s occupation policies.

While the Rojava Revolution inspires worldwide opponents of ethnocentrism, religious fundamentalism and global capitalism, some local, regional, and global powers are also hostile to the outbreak of freedom, particularly the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Turkey began attacking the free life of people whom they labelled “terrorists” both directly and through paramilitary proxies. With international support, Turkey continues its attacks unabated to this day. In recent years, it has been carrying out these attacks using armed drones.

Despite years of attacks by Turkey, its affiliated paramilitary forces, and ISIS, a significant ecological revolution led by Gen Z has been achieved in North and East Syria. In the face of ongoing threats and embargoes, the revolution is progressing step by step through communes. With its pillars of democracy, women, and ecology, the Rojava Revolution stands before us as an alternative that Gen Z can create elsewhere in the pursuit of freedom.

___

Murat Bakur is a journalist and writer from Northern Kurdistan. His first novel, “Open Blue Freedom,” won second prize in the 5th Deniz Fırat Story and Photography Competition. Several of his short stories have been published by various news agencies. He continues his journalistic work at Medya Haber TV.

[1] Matt Broomfield, Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment (AK Press, 2025).

[2] Formed from the combination of the words “Star” (goddess) and “Yekîtiya” (unity), the name means “Union of All Goddesses” or “Union of Women.”

The post Rojava: A GEN Z Alternative to Capitalist Patriarchy appeared first on Void Network.

ΕΝΑ ΟΔΟΙΠΟΡΙΚΟ ΣΤΟ ΠΟΛΕΜΟ ΤΗΣ ΣΥΡΙΑΣ
ΚΑΙ ΤΗΝ ΗΡΩΙΚΗ ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ ΤΗΣ ROJAVA

ΠΡΟΒΟΛΗ Ντοκιμαντέρ
& ΣΥΖΗΤΗΣΗ
με τον σκηνοθέτη Αλέξη Νταλούμη

ΚΥΡ. 22/12/2024
ΩΡΑ 20.30

Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο
ΘΕΑΤΡΟ ΕΜΠΡΟΣ
Ρ. Παλαμήδη, 2 Ψυρρή

Διοργάνωση:

ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ | http://voidnetwork.gr

https://www.facebook.com/BelkiSibeFilm

Belkî Sibê σημαίνει «Ίσως Αύριο» & είναι το ντοκιμαντέρ ενός εθελοντή στρατιώτη σε μια επανάσταση. Απεικονίζει την στρατιωτική ζωή και τις μάχες στις πρώτες γραμμές του Διεθνούς Τάγματος Ελευθερίας, στις τάξεις του οποίου ο σκηνοθέτης πολέμησε, καθώς & την ζωή των πολιτών στα μετόπισθεν & τον κοινωνικό μετασχηματισμό που επιχειρείται στην Δημοκρατική Αυτόνομη Διοίκηση της Βόρειας και Ανατολικής Συρίας. Οι διηγήσεις του Αλέξη Νταλούμη θα μας δώσουν την ευκαιρία να συζητήσουμε την κατάσταση στην Μέση Ανατολή σήμερα, να δυναμώσουμε την αλληλεγγύη μας για τους Σύριους και Κούρδους αδερφούς μας & τις αδελφές μας που αγωνίζονται εκεί.

Το ντοκιμαντέρ αφηγείται ένα ταξίδι 18 μηνών μέσα στον πόλεμο και την επανάσταση, στη Ροζάβα (Δυτικό) Κουρδιστάν της ΒΑ Συρίας, κατά τη διάρκεια της προέλασης και της νίκης των Συριακών Δημοκρατικών Δυνάμεων κατά του ISIS, καθώς και την ιστορία του Διεθνούς Τάγματος Ελευθερίας. Η ταινία ακολουθεί ένα χρονοδιάγραμμα από τον Ιούλιο του 2016 (μάχη της Μίνμπιτζ) μέχρι το τέλος του 2017 (απελευθέρωση της Ράκα και κατάρρευση του Ισλαμικού Χαλιφάτου), αλλά περιλαμβάνει κι επικαιροποιημένο υλικό από τα τέλη του 2021, στο τέλος κάθε κεφαλαίου

θα ακολουθήσει συζήτηση με τον σκηνοθέτη.

The post Belkî Sibê- Ντοκιμαντέρ για τον πόλεμο στην Συρία- ΚΥΡ 22/12/2024 ΕΜΠΡΟΣ appeared first on Void Network.

By political philosophy, I mean a way of thinking about politics, institutions and decision-making. How people arbitrate their business with one another, theories of government – or self-government – or the abolition of all hierarchy. I liked to boil down anarchism into a few pithy phrases like, “anarchism is about no one having power over anyone else.”

I was not wrong. Anarchism is indeed about all of these things. It is indeed a political philosophy. It is indeed about how people take decisions together and manage their affairs collectively. But I thought this was its philosophy in toto, that there was nothing more to it. It was a way of thinking that was separate from our interior realities. It is an external philosophy, above all about how we behave towards one another.

These ideas take you far in analysing the current political and economic situation and working out how to reform it and replace it. In place of a top-down system of government, we need a system where decisions are made by the mass, including everyone with a stake. In place of an economic system controlled by the few with massive wealth, we need one where shares are equal, both in terms of wealth but also in terms of agency; where everyone gets a say over the economic affairs that affect them, whether in the workplace or society at large. The individual and society are at the heart of this idea. Individuals must be free to act as they please, but always taking into account the needs of others – a fair and equal negotiation (this isn’t the most purely libertarian form of anarchism, of course, more socialist libertarianism).

But who is that individual and how do they think? Anarchists are sceptical of formal religion, seeing it as another form of social control where agency is denied the individual in favour of a rigid orthodoxy enforced hierarchically – most often by men. The claim that god exists is seen as a veil, used to conceal many human wrongs and injustices, excused as a universal salve and explanation. Anarchism rejects religion: no gods, no masters.

Thus, I had been sceptical of those who sometimes called themselves spiritual anarchists. What is spiritualism but another kind of religion that confuses and misleads us from our earthly realities? I saw what can loosely be called spiritualism as narcissistic and selfish, with its focus on the individual soul and its needs and expression. Some of those I saw talking of spiritualism retreated from the battleground of society into drugs and other forms of refuge, both physical and mental. The battle is in our cities and streets, here and now, I argued crossly.

But those same ‘spiritualists’ claimed to me that there could not be revolution of the whole of society without revolutionising the way that individuals think within it. You couldn’t expect that society would adopt practices of equality, respect and inclusion unless we ourselves were transformed from the rationalism and analytic thinking that sees everything as structure or transaction. The interior needed to be reformed too. You couldn’t have revolution in one without revolution in the other.

I have come to think that they might be right. At the heart of all anarchism is how we treat other people. Anarchism demands that this treatment is always respectful and egalitarian: no one can coerce another, whether by overt means or subtle. My kind of anarchism demands that we treat others as they wish, not as we wish (which is, by the way, an explicit rejection of the so-called ‘golden rule’, under which we treat others as we would wish to be treated. Instead we must attend to what they say they want, not what we think they want). We must give up all notions of domination, of influence and getting others to do what we want. We must give up all power.

I once worked in government. I was agog with power, convinced that I worked among an elite few who understood the needs of society – in my case, in foreign policy and diplomacy – better than society understood itself. This fed my ego and structured my life around career and status. It has been a hard road to abandon these pillars of my sense of worth and self. If I don’t have power, what am I? If I cannot tell others what to do, what value do my ideas and wishes have? If it’s just me, what am I?

I have found that I need to believe in something. I’m not sure what I would call it. But I suspect my spiritualist friends would call it just that: spiritual need. It’s a belief that there are values and meanings outside ourselves but which animate and inspire our interior realities. Religions might name this thing god, expressed through litany. But my litany is anarchism, and I’m not willing to call that guiding spirit god. It is more earthly, it is more human.

I identify it by observing the core of anarchist practice: the interaction with others. How we treat other people. In anarchism, that interaction must be guided by consideration and caring, the putting of the needs of others on an equal footing to our own. At least: in its most extreme iteration, it is the erasure of self. Lao Tzu talks about this in the Tao te Ching. It is having power by giving up all power. He reached this conclusion thousands of years ago. It is a harmony between how we see and treat others and how we treat ourselves.

There is a word for this practice: it is Love.

Without this ‘spiritual’ core, anarchism struggles to make sense. If it is judged in the terms of current capitalist culture, it is not necessarily a more efficient or productive practice: it does not necessarily produce more goods or make more money.

What it accomplishes is in fact of infinite worth: the beauty of humans living with one another in love and respect and equality. These are abstract, ineffable things that cannot be measured in euros, pounds or dollars. Indeed, this stuff is beyond all terms themselves – and this is why it’s hard to put it into words too. It is on a plane above all that. And if you want to call this a ‘spiritual’ plane, I am happy with that. What goes on in the spirit or the soul matters, for it matters to the exterior reality too. What we believe in ourselves is intrinsic to how we engage with the world. One doesn’t work without the other.

____________

Carne Ross is a former British diplomat, author of The Leaderless Revolution: How ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century, and the subject of the film Accidental Anarchist

http://www.accidentalanarchist.net/

The post Anarchy is Love! – Carne Ross appeared first on Void Network.

While providing an extensive catalog of scholarly references for the academic reader, this delightful and engaging study is directed at a wide audience and demands no other requirements than a love for pirates, daring theoretical speculation and passionate, yet respectful, inquiry.

Gabriel Kuhn (born in Innsbruck, Austria, 1972) lives as an independent author and translator in Stockholm, Sweden. His publications in German include the award-winning ‘Neuer Anarchismus’ in den USA: Seattle und die Folgen (2008). His publications with PM Press include Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy (2010), Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics (2010), Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics (2011), Turning Money into Revolution: The Unlikely Story of Denmark’s Revolutionary Bank Robbers (2014), and Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North (2020). He blogs at lefttwothree.org.

Tasos Sagris, co-founder of Void Network and the Institute for Experimental Arts is a poet, theatre director and cultural activist from Athens. His publications in English include We Are an Image From the Future The Greek Revolt of December 2008 (AK Press, 2010) and From Democracy to Freedom (Crimethinc, 2016).

1.

T.S.: The bourgeoisie created their own universities, academies, honored scientists and publication companies to praise their own establishment as the only possible way of existence, defend private property and the dominant regime, to honor the myths, the history and the superior glory of the upper class, to delegitimize the efforts of the oppressed for social liberation. A characteristic that I love in your books is your uncompromised dedication to consciously write history books for the benefit of the global anarchist movement. What is the role of the anarchist scientists in our struggle against domination?

G.K.: The production of knowledge isnothing neutral. We select material and interpret it based and on how we view the world (our “epistemology,” as people who like those kinds of word would say) as well as on our moral, social, and cultural norms. There is nothing objective about allegedly objective science.

I don’t think this means that there’s a free-for-all type of scholarship, where you simply make up stories and sell them as historical truth. That’s not scholarship, that’s manipulation. Certain things happened in certain ways, and we have a responsibility to acknowledge that. But we also have a responsibility to acknowledge why and how we tell certain stories. We can watch the same football game and, without either of us lying, tell two very different stories about it. The more that the audience knows about us and our interests, the easier it will be for them to interpret our stories and make up their own mind about what happened.

So, this is how I see anarchist scholarship. I am interested in people fighting for freedom and justice. These are the stories I will seek out, and I will look at everything from that angle. There is no point in manipulating the facts. We don’t win by doing that just so that the story fits our interests in the best possible way. People will realize what we’re doing, and we’ll lose credibility. But we can refuse to buy into a way of writing history where the powerful always get their way, where everything supposedly happened in their favor because it was just, deserved, and inevitable. Anarchist scholarship means to say, no, there have always been power struggles, there have always been subversive movements, and these movements haven’t always losteither and they might indeedwin more often in the future if we learn our lessons right.

2.

T.S.: What inspired you to write a book about the pirates?

G.K.: Originally, a fascination with pirate life that I believe a lot of teenagers share. Freedom, courage, adventure! Once I learned that there was more to that than simple imagination, that pirate communities actually were quite progressive and democratic for their time, I added some research to the fascination and wrote a little book about pirates as a student in Austria. It was translated into English, and based on that translation PM Press asked me some years later do to an updated and expanded version of it. That’s how Life Under the Jolly Roger came about.

3.

T.S.: William Burroughs in his wonderful, utopian book Cities of the Red Night, builds a fictional argument that the possible success of the piratic struggles against the established powers of their era could activate revolutionary conditions in the mainland of Europe much earlier and much more progressive than French revolution. What you think about the Burroughs argument and why this didn’t happen? What was the influence of the piratic actions in the other side of the planet to the masses of poor people of Europe in 16th-17th century?

G.K.: As you say, Burrough’saccount is a work of fiction, and he uses the example of a pirate community in Madagascar by the name of Libertaliaas a kind of radical utopia. Libertalia was described in Captain Johnson’s famous History of the Pirates from 1724. Burroughs is not the only one who has incorporated Libertalia in his writing. It probably never existed, butit inspires radical utopias to this day.

Personally, I think that if you read Captain Johnson’s book closely, Libertalia is not that great of a model, it’s more like an outpost of European republicanism in Africa, but that’s a separate discussion. That Captain Johnson would write about it all goes to show that, already in the early eighteenth century, people used pirate communities to project progressive ideas onto them. Burrough’s argument is a little like wishful thinking: “Had the pirates at the time been as radical and powerful as I would have wanted them to be, they could have radicalized mainland Europe.” But there probably was no Libertalia, and the overall power of the pirates was limited.

However, there were clear connections between radical political movements in the seventeenth century and the so-called golden age of piracy, which started in the Caribbean around 1680. The British had exiled many radicals from the English Revolution to the Caribbean colonies, and not few of them ended up in the ranks of the pirates. How inspirational the pirates were on the poor masses of Europe is hard to say, but the fact that pirate plays were staged at popular English theaters already in the late seventeenth century would indicate that they had some impact. So, there was a synergetic effect between radicals on the European mainland and pirate communities.

Had this led to broad social movements able to advance radical political change, Burrough’s fantasy maybe could have become a reality. Pirate communities were certainly more radical than the bourgeois fellows who staged the French Revolution. But they weren’t strong and influential enough. The nation-states were able to crush them. Too bad.

4.

T.S.: Your book offers us amazing parts of criticism to the pirates. As you mention most of them was Dutch, French and English racists, slave hunters and looters of poor villages. How could this stop the first wave of capital accumulation?  Were pirates revolutionaries and what exactly was revolutionary among their practices?

G.K.: There might have been elements of conscious revolutionary activities among the pirates – as I said, people with political experience were in their ranks – but I believe it was minor. I don’t think there was much of an explicit critique of early capitalism. Yet, while pirates understood that in a capitalist society you needed material wealth to lead a good life, they weren’t willing to subject themselves to the life that capitalism had foreseen for them: toiling away for a few crumbs of the cake, under the whip of both bosses, politicians, and security forces. By raiding merchant ships and coastal towns, they disrupted early capitalist trade to the point of threatening capital’s global expansion. Perhaps that turned them into some kind of proxy revolutionaries who didn’t care much about thelabel themselves. But they became the nation-states’ enemy number one during those years. There have always been plenty of criminals, but not all of them threatened the economic and political order by taking from it whilerejecting its foundations.

5.

T.S.: In your book you offer us a historical analysis of the Pirate’s legacy from a revolutionary perspective. There are a lot of horrible choices, mistakes and a lot of failures in the piratic history – but, there is an emancipatory and revolutionary element to the life and struggle of the Piratic communities.

A.

T.S.: Can we learn something useful for our social struggles from the pirates of the past?

G.K.: Considering that the pirates haven’t left us with any records or writings, it’s perhaps hard to “learn” much in any more classical sense, but, like few others in European history, the pirates indicate the starting point of any radical transformation: to reject the status quo, to refuse to play by the rules, and to try to live a different life at the risk of being killed for it. This is where revolutionary change begins, and the pirates tick those boxes. And I believe that’s where their main role lies even for radical movements today. They are inspirators.

B.

T.S.: Probably one of the finest characteristics of your book is that you offer us detailed informations about the failures and mistakes of the pirates. What you think the pirates did and we have to avoid in our plans for social liberation?

G.K: I think the biggest problem was that pirate society wasn’t sustainable. To begin with, there were, essentially, no women, so the society couldn’t reproduce itself. To maintain its numbers, it constantly needed new people to join. There was a high turnover, and not everyone coming in necessarily espoused the same ideals or interpreted the pirate way in the same manner. During the final years of the golden age, when the pirates fought for their survival, they would force people to join their ships just to keep up the numbers. Obviously, this can’t work in the long run.

There were also no binding social structures that could have facilitated the survival of pirate society. I don’t think institutions were needed, not even necessarily organizations. But some common features beyond the pirate flag that held everything together. Look at hardcore punk: it’s been around for almost half a century, lacks institutions and organizations, but it has a number of common features: the music, an anti-establishment attitude, DIY values, venues where people regularly gather, zines (or today perhaps blogs) that serve as common reference points. Any community, any movement needs some kind of social glue. I think that glue was missing among the pirates.

Other than that, I believe there wasn’t much that the pirates “did wrong.” There were internal contradictions, but any society has internal contradictions. These contradictions can be worked out: sometimes, they’re even healthy. At the end of the day, the pirates suffered a simple fate: they were militarily crushed by their enemy. Many radical movements suffered the same fate.

C

T.S.: Do you believe that the anarchist movements of today have some kind of connection with these crazy motherfuckers, 300 years after their defeat from the kings, and queens and proto-capitalists? Is there something that connects anarchists with the pirates and into what they can benefit the future revolutions? What you think the pirates can offer as reference points to the revolutionaries of our generation? Are these images of a vision for the future? 

G.K.: Yes, I think there’s a connection through the rebellious spirit that the radicals of today and tomorrow share with the pirates. That spirit can benefit any revolutionary movement. The pirates provide a vision for the future insofar as they tried to create their own communities apart from the state. That’s animportant aspect of the pirates and their power of inspiration: their communities were set apart from the system in very tangible ways; they were out there on their ships, somewhere on an ocean much harder to scale and monitor than today, able to hide on faraway islands, in lagoons and mazelike river deltas. How can this not be inspirational?

6.

T.S.: A very unique and interesting process in your book is that you put the Piratic communities under very detailed investigation based on the strategic thought of different revolutionary thinkers. Among them we found chapters based on revolutionary strategies of MaoTse Tung, Carlos Marighella, the social bandits theory of Eric Hobsbawm, war machine and nomadism of Deleuze andGuattari, ecstatic life of Nietzsche. What lead you to apply this method and what was the result of this experiment?

This really came out of the studies I did at the time I started writing about pirates. I was a philosophy student and I liked theory and the history of ideas. I have close to zero interest in academic philosophy today and no longer read much of the kind of literature I read back then. I pretty much stick to history and concrete political debate. With that said, ideas are nice. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write that philosophy is about creating concepts. I like that. Theory can easily turn into nonsensical blah blah, especially when academic bubbles detached from everyday life need a justification to reproduce privileged social spaces, but without theory, without developing concepts based on everyday experience that can be used to alter that experience, there is no social progress. The intention with the pirate book was to do something in that vein: to use theory, but to use it in a very practical manner, to flesh out concepts that, in turn, can inspire action. How well that worked is up to the readers to decide. I will say, though, that one of the nicest compliments I got for the book was an accomplished fiction writer saying that it was the first time Deleuze and Guattari made any sense to them.

7.

The disrespect to private property, the break of social constraints and the need for communal solving of the social and private problems caused by inequality and exploitation seem that brings the pirates close to any one of lower class people. Why you think 500 years after the death of the pirates we are still fighting the upper class without obvious success of overthrowing them?

Thanks for an easy question!

Seriously, I don’t know. But let’s try to look at it from an angle where the pirates might be able to help. German anarchist Gustav Landauer was fascinated by a small, sixteenth-century book authored by the French humanist Étienne de la Boétie. It is known in English as the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Why, de la Boétie asked, do people so often choose to support social structures that obviously aren’t beneficial to their well-being? The theme has reappeared in radical writing throughout the centuries, not least after the horrific experience of twentieth-century fascism. If anyone had found an answer to the problem yet, we would probably live in a very different world, but: the pirates, clearly, weren’t voluntary servants. They broke with a pattern that is essential for oppressive power structures to work. It’s a key lesson to learn from them.

8.

T.S.: The only images I have before your book about the pirates comes from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, the Pirate Utopias by Hakim Bey and the amazing TV series Black Sails. In all of them it seems that the pirates join forces under specific circumstances, only if they are under serious threat and without any specific prearranged plan or general strategy. Most of the other time they fight each other, they don’t communicate or trust each other and they are not capable to have any general plan. This reminds me a lot the anarchist and leftist groups today all around the world. What was the reason that the pirates (and still ourselves) fail to find organizing methods that will make use of our differences and disagreements as a beneficial weapon against our common enemies and not as a way of self-destruction and disempowerment of our communities.

With respect to our scenes, I would say there are two main aspects. Both might seem trivial, but that doesn’t make them less relevant.

One is egoism. The great revolutionary theorists were right when they demanded a “new human being” as a precondition for revolutionary change. Now, a new human being doesn’t fall from the sky and can’t be created in some school or guerrilla training camp. It can’t precede the revolutionary struggle, it has to develop within it. But its development must be a main feature of the struggle, otherwise in-fighting will be inevitable. Even if we genuinely long for a society of equals, we have been socialized in a highly competitive, bourgeois environment, and this impacts our movements. We – even anarchists, if we are honest – will often want to lead, will want our ideas to be recognized as superior to others, will want to be acknowledged as the most revolutionary of all revolutionaries. Look at the entirely insignificant things that people can get worked up about. There is no explanation other than this being about ego trips that have nothing to do with the good of the people. We need to be wary of that and call it when we see it.

The other aspect was once summed up by the ever observant Ian MacKaye in the following manner: “People’s power is limited to their scope, and it’s like that saying goes: ‘The people who get hit are the people within arm’s reach.’” In short, if you can’t get to the real enemy – the politicians, the CEOs, the cops – you will let loose on the person next to you. You’ll want to get your anger and frustration out and feel like you’re getting somewhere, have a tiny victory, perhapspreventing their article from being published or excluding them from organizing the local anarchist bookfair. Psychologically, that’s understandable, but it’s devastating for our movements.

With respect to the pirates, I think it was even simpler, plain survival instinct. We have enough evidence to conclude that there was a genuine attempt on many pirate ships to create a rather democratic community with a relatively fair share of the wealth. This was stated in the “Codes” of the pirate ships that we have heard about a lot. But, as stated before, there was no strong social glue that guaranteed that you could expect the same on any pirate ship you signed on to, or that everyone signing the Codes really could be trusted.

I was also talking before about being socialized in a competitive society. Imagine the society that the pirates were socialized in. There was no “social peace” brought on by social-democratic class compromise. You had to struggle for your survival every day. Of course, this impacted the pirates. People were suspicious, also of one another. Again, too little social glue.

9.

In the introduction of your book you quote from Outcasts of the Sea: Pirates and Piracy, an Edward Lucie Smith’s book. The paragraph explains the popularity of piratic stories from 17th century until our days and the way the myths still influence our modern lives:

“The story of the pirates is a product of the urban imagination. One of its most important functions is to provide a safety valve against the pressures exerted on the individual by the demands of civic morality. The basic fantasies are those of unbridled freedom and power as compensation for what the average bourgeois is never going to achieve, however successful he may be on a material level.”

Is this a possible strategy for the anarchist movement of our era, producing such extraordinary actions and lifestyles that will appear as a myth in the miserable minds of the people around us? Can you share some ideas about what can be a myth like this today?

Yes, I never thought of it that way, but I suppose anarchism – at least a particular kind of anarchism – could do that. In simple terms, create ways of life that are attractive to people. They would entail a sense of adventure, make life exciting, but not on a purely individual level, there’d have to be an element of social justice. A Robin Hood-type element. “Social bandits” can do that, free-roaming travelers can do that, communes beyond the restrictions of bourgeois life can do that. In and of themselves, none of these projects are sufficient to bring about an anarchist society, but they contain important aspects of them and might make people curious about anarchism. Key, of course, is that these projects are not driven by people trying to demonstrate how much better they are than the masses (who “don’t get it”), essentially preventing any inspirational potential, but by people able to respond positively to curious inquiry, even by people who aren’t well-versed radicals and who don’t talk or look that way.

Anarchist ideas are attractive to people. Pretty much anyone likes freedom, and most people like justice, too. It’s just that few of them have seen examples of anarchist life that appear attractive. Partly, that’s the enemy’s fault who has done a good job to ensure that very few such examples exist. But partly it’s also our own fault because we haven’t been able to establish many, and easily get sidetracked by the problems mentioned above: in-fighting, showing off, etc.

The pirate flag still has power for a reason. It’s up to us to provide the right content.

________

The post Life Under the Jolly Roger- Gabriel Kuhn talks with Tasos Sagris appeared first on Void Network.

“Revolution — without icons and without capital letters — remains a necessity, as an indeterminate idea of change and as the compass for human will. Not as a model, not as a prefabricated schema, but as a strategic hypothesis and a regulating horizon.” These words by the philosopher Daniel Bensaïd begin Enzo Traverso’s new book, soberly entitled Revolution: An Intellectual History. Traverso, one of Italy’s foremost historians of ideas, now teaches at Cornell University. Il manifesto met up with him in Rome during a recent visit in which he presented his book.

Today, the enemies of political and social revolution speak of “revolution” when they are selling the latest model of smartphone, the latest brand of toothpaste, or running for election. Whereas those who would be in favour of revolution are silent. In what sense is revolution still a “strategic hypothesis” today, as Bensaïd argued?

There has been an obfuscation of the word “revolution,” which has become devoid of content, an empty signifier. There was a time when the Left had to choose between reform and revolution. Today, the word “revolution” refers to the latest model of iPhone and “reform” to some socially regressive measure related to the introduction of neoliberal management (hence labour reforms, reforms to the healthcare system, university reforms and so on). This metamorphosis is also significant in the field of historiography, where the idea of “fascist revolution” — itself belonging to fascist rhetoric — is widespread, while the revolutionary dimension of events such as the Spanish Civil War or the Paris Commune tends to be ignored. The concept of “revolution” changes, as do its political uses. We are well past the era when a historian like Eric Hobsbawm made it the key to interpreting modernity. I am convinced that this eclipse has its origin — far from questions of the communicative strategies of politics and the culture industry — in the defeat of the revolutions of the twentieth century. This was, indeed, the age of revolutions, not just wars and totalitarianism. In the century of the “principle of hope,” communism had become a concrete and possible utopia, in Ernst Bloch’s sense. This “horizon of expectations” has vanished.

You write that the movements over the last fifteen years, and perhaps even longer than that, have not manifested a historical memory, yet they are not prisoners of the past and they need to reinvent themselves. How is it possible to create a revolutionary political tradition, under these conditions?

Obviously, it is not a matter of blaming young people for their lack of historical memory. Rather, it is a question of coming to terms with the “sense” of history that is today dominant. The new social and political movements have considerable potential, but they are the offspring of a historical turning point that has evacuated the utopian horizon of the past, identified precisely with the idea of revolution. Reconstructing its history and semantic shifts will perhaps help us understand that it remains a compass for our time.

What does it mean not to have a memory of revolution?

It means that the cycle of revolutions in the twentieth century has come to an end and that we are living the consequences of this change. For a century, history seemed to be running towards socialism, whose premise was the conquest of power by military force. This vision is light years away from our intellectual universe today. It is this turn of events that prevents the new movements from fitting into a historical continuity. This does not mean that there will be no more revolutions. On the contrary, there have already been some in recent years — just think of the “Arab Spring”. These revolutions, however, no longer identified themselves with past models — socialism, national liberation, pan-Arabism —which are now obsolete, exhausted, or defeated, and they did not really know where they were going. Once the oppressive regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak had been overthrown, they did not know how to replace them.

Even when strong models did exist, many revolutions failed. Is a loss of bearings an aggravating factor?

It is also a condition that allows for great freedom. The idea of a radical transformation persists even though it does not recognise itself as heir to the models inherited from the twentieth century, in particular communism and anti-colonialism. But a new model is not yet in sight. This vacuum is at the origin of an incredible creativity, I would even say a considerable theoretical sophistication, present in movements that are forced to reinvent themselves. At the basis of this creativity is a revolutionary question: how to change the world, put an end to capitalism, save the planet, overcome the appalling inequalities that plague our societies? I think that this need is widely felt among young people today.

Reference to the 1960s and 1970s runs through several of your books, for example Left-Wing Melancholia. Marxism, History and Memory. What are the differences between those years and today?

Those who discovered politics in the 1970s had to choose from a wide range of well-defined movements and organisations. This is, fortunately, not the problem for young people today, who think and act without feeling that they are being enclosed in ideological cages. However, this change does not only offer advantages, but also brings great fragility, precisely because these movements are not inscribed in a historical continuity. They are ephemeral, short-lived sparks. When they do manage to build up a durable and established political presence, they run the risk of being reabsorbed by traditional politics, as we have seen with Podemos, with Syriza, or even in Great Britain, where the attempt to renew the Labour party from below hit a wall. In Italy, all the movements that have appeared in the last twenty years have failed to give themselves a political expression except through coalitions of micro-apparatuses that would stifle any enthusiasm. We need to go beyond these brief upsurges to reconstruct a horizon of expectation, to reinvent an idea of futurity.

In the neoliberal societies that you analyse in Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography there is the terror of failure and defeat. Does this put us off even thinking of trying again?

Maybe, but socialism was born out of “working through” defeat, namely the defeat of the French Revolution that ended with the Restoration. The twenty-first century was born out of another historical defeat, of global dimensions. The younger generations probably do not realise this, but they act in a context heavily burdened by this legacy. Recovering a sense of history, knowing that changing the world is an age-old project — a project that in the twentieth century not only seemed possible, but was put into action — could offer an identity, however unstable it is, and make us feel less vulnerable.

One of the most interesting ideas that has emerged in recent years from the movements is intersectionality, the convergence of struggles and a new idea of class as the object of multiple oppressions and the subject of possible resistances. This perspective is often evoked in France, a country where you have lived and taught, including in the experience of La France Insoumise. Can this be a useful practice for constructing the sense of the revolutionary perspective?

La France Insoumise has evolved in a positive way. Several unsavoury nationalists or “sovereigntyists” left or were asked to leave. It participated in the Gilets Jaunes even without being the driving force in this movement. It was able to integrate the environmental dimension and practise — as far as possible — intersectionality between claims and demands based on gender, race, and class. Because it is attuned to the anti-racist movements in working-class banlieues, it overcame the narrow limits of “national-republicanism”, the old framework of French socialism. The left-wing coalition has achieved a significant electoral success, but clearly this is no revolution. It must overcome many obstacles.

How so?

From a purely formal point of view, the programme of the left-wing NUPES coalition is more moderate than that of François Mitterrand’s Union de la gauche in 1981. It does not include the nationalisation of certain key sectors of the economy. Mélenchon has honestly acknowledged this: even if he had become prime minister, he would not have had the strength to implement his programme without the support of a strong social movement, which is missing at the moment. The problem is the very high level of abstention. In the current context, the old programme of social democracy — redistribution of wealth, social reforms, defence of wages and pensions, access to education, transport, and health — implies a rupture with the neoliberal order. La France Insoumise embodies this rupture. In the post-war period, social democracy was the instrument of the “humanisation” of capitalism facing a gigantic challenge, that of socialism as a “principle of hope” unfolding across a global scale. Today, social democracy has become one of the pillars of the neoliberal order. In the era of universal reification, a genuine social-democratic programme cannot be realised without a rupture with the dominant model of capitalism.

There is not only the history of revolutions but also a history of counterrevolutions. This has been the case since the beginning of the modern revolutions, the French and Soviet revolutions, with devastating effects. Are counterrevolutions simply reactions or are they autonomous, producing a new reality of their own?

It is a kind of norm of history: there is no revolution without counterrevolution, bound by a symbiotic relationship. The “velvet revolutions”, which emerged when Soviet power was in crisis and could no longer send the tanks to suppress them, were an exception. Counterrevolutions have a culture and ideology of their own, which go through transformations. In the twentieth century, they produced fascism. The rhetoric of fascism was intended to be “revolutionary”, but its main component was reaction against Bolshevism. The twentieth-century counterrevolution did not claim to restore the ancien régime but rather to invent a new form of power. Its culture was not insignificant, even if some considered it only an “anti-culture”; after all, fascism invented a new idea of civilisation. In Germany, Nazism produced great figures like Jünger, Schmitt and Heidegger. In France, the literature of the first half of the twentieth century is marked, after Proust, by a string of fascists like Céline and Drieu la Rochelle.

Can the current neoliberal cycle be interpreted as a counterrevolution — as a reaction to the global revolutionary cycle of the 1960s and 1970s?

Yes. I would like to answer, as a historian, by evoking Fernand Braudel’s longue durée. The neoliberal age we are living through today can be seen as a backlash — in this sense, a counterrevolution — against the long cycle of twentieth-century revolutions. On the social level, this is obvious. All the social achievements of the last century have been called into question. The power relations between classes on a global scale have changed profoundly. In Brooklyn, workers in an Amazon warehouse gained recognition for their union — and this was one of the great achievements of recent years. If we think about what the labour movement was in the 1960s and 1970s, there is no doubt that this achievement comes in a frightening context of regression.

What is the history of the counterrevolution which we are living through?

For decades, neoliberalism was a heretical current within the culture of the ruling classes. During World War II, who would have taken seriously a book like The Road to Serfdom, which presented Roosevelt as a fifth columnist for totalitarianism, at a time when the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain were fighting Nazism and fascism? At the time, Hayek’s ideas were inadmissible. The first sign of a turnaround came with the Chilean coup of 1973. The Chicago Boys arrived and introduced structural reforms that the Left around Gabriel Boric still has to joust with today. Pinochet embodied the armed counterrevolution. Subsequently, neoliberalism imposed itself with an “anti-totalitarian” rhetoric based on the combination of liberal democracy and market society.

So, neoliberalism is not only a reaction, but also an institutionalised political form and a specific form of life that aspires to continual self-renovation. Is it right to cast it as “revolutionary”?

The neoliberal “revolution” — which extends far beyond neoliberalism as an economic model — is a permanent bombardment of images, fashions, commodities, and illusions. It is, in a word, a “privatised utopia”. This is no innocent operation. It seeks to instil the feeling that everything is transforming around us even if the socio-economic order that produces catastrophes and immense suffering, capitalism as civilisation — what Andreas Malm calls the “capitalocene” — remains immutable. I would like to emphasise that neoliberalism has not only imposed itself with armies, but above all as a “democratic” alternative to totalitarianism, which all twentieth-century history has been folded into.

If revolution has been hijacked by counterrevolutionaries, how can this outlook be turned around?

I don’t think that anyone has the recipe for that. Revolution is a historical moment in which the oppressed become aware of their strength, their ability to change the world through collective action. Walter Benjamin used an evocative formula: the splitting of the atom that unleashes extraordinary and explosive forces. Revolution is the moment when the linearity of history is suddenly broken and everything becomes possible, when new horizons open up: revolutions are factories of utopias. This inevitably entails considerable risks because dangerous paths can also be taken.

Revolutions, however, do not happen by decree, they arise from below and spread like “furies”, as Jules Michelet put it. But it is important to know that, even though revolutions are continually being exorcised, they are still breathing life into history.

________

Source: autonomies.org/2022/08/enzo-traverso-revolutions-are-still-breathing-life-into-history

The post Enzo Traverso: Revolutions are still breathing life into history appeared first on Void Network.

Preface 

Below are two excerpts from Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s The Future is Inherited, a compilation of essays and reflections composed during the initial months of the 2019 Chilean uprising, which recently appeared in English. 

In October 2019, Transantiago, the Metropolitan Transit system in Chile’s capital, raised the train fare by thirty pesos. In response, high school students planned what they called a Evasión Masiva, a week of coordinated protests across the city where participants and commuters alike jumped metro turnstiles and refused to pay the fare. On Friday, October 18, a “mass evasion”  shut down Santiago’s metropolitan transit system during rush hour. Crowds began gathering across the city, and by nightfall, barricades guarded by singing revelers burned at every major intersection. Banks and government buildings were set ablaze, while supermarkets, WalMarts, and one sixth of all corporate owned pharmacies were looted. The country’s President at the time, Sebastián Piñera, held a press conference in which he declared a “state of emergency” in the city. Twenty-four hours later, tanks and Humvees patrolled Santiago, military curfews were enforced, and civil liberties were suspended for the first time since the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

This inaugural wave of unrest was quickly countered by a series of political maneuvers that sought to channel the energy in the streets into institutional changes. By November 2019, the ruling conservative party and its opposition agreed to initiating a process that would lead to the drafting of a new constitution. 

Two years have since passed. The constitutional convention has begun to draft a new constitution, and Gabriel Boric, a leader from the 2011 university student movement turned congressional representative, now serves as Chile’s president. In the eyes of many who cleave to the normative framework of political conflict, this trajectory appears as a sorely needed process of social change. However, as Karmy’s meditations on the experiences and rhythms of October 2019 reveal, the most powerful elements of the revolt are often those least capable of being translated into institutional transformations.  

For Karmy, the date “October 18th” marks not simply a night of insurrection, but a fissure that split Chilean history open, like a short circuit that bridged the anger against the Pinochet Dictatorship, the 1990’s transition to democracy, and the present forms of technocratic governance. After decades of violent social control, forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial murder, the political reconciliation that announced the shift from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy was made possible by a series of agreements and accords between Pinochet’s administration, its political supporters, and its centrist and leftist opponents. This meant that throughout the 1990s, Pinochet remained a “senator for life” and the head of the Chilean military, while his 1981 constitution enshrining the Chicago boy’s neoliberal principles remained in place.

Although social democrats and progressives like to present the rampant inequalities and political restrictions that plague contemporary Chile as institutional hangovers from the dictatorship, the Chilean left has its own part to play in this history. As Karmy shows, their inability to break away from “the transitional episteme” has committed them to a pragmatic framework of political conflict, which prioritizes the restoration of a shared legitimacy and the practical matter of governability over all expressions of “popular,” i.e., everyday people’s concern for justice, dignity, and self-respect. If the revolt taught us anything, it’s that the real conflict is not between the camps of left and the right, but between an elitist framework for resolving questions of governance, and a Chilean people who no longer wish to be governed as a population whatsoever.

Whether or not the energy from October 2019 will succeed in breaking out of this transitional episteme remains to be seen. What limitations would need to be overcome, in order for this to happen? In Chile’s capital, it was the state of exception and the military in the streets that allowed the game of mass evasion to be transformed into a general revolt. Yet constitutional states of exception have been declared many times in Chile’s periphery in recent years, without the corresponding eruption of mass revolt. Mapuche communities in Southern Chile have been occupied by the Chilean military since September 2021, in response to an escalation in direct actions against the local elite complicit with extractive industries and ecological destruction earlier that year. In the desert regions along Chile’s northern border, the military has also been called on to police the crisis of mass undocumented immigration spurred by Venezuelans fleeing the economic crisis. This suggests, first, that our understanding of popular revolt must expand beyond the spectacle of urban riots and street demonstrations, to consider what revolt looks like in other territories. At the same time, the concept of “popular” revolt has often been hamstrung by its association with an idea of “the people” as the agent and actor of struggle, whether this be the Nation or various abstract “communities.” As Karmy shows, the protagonists of the Chilean revolt, at the moment they take to the streets, cannot be neatly subsumed under any such categories. In this way, his work not only allows us to see the limitations of the 2019-2021 wave of global uprisings, but also helps us identify potential connections with others struggles internationally that continue to confront similar obstacles. 

—Emilio Janequeo, Santiago de Chile, April 2022

October 18 [1]

Whatever happened to this date? Is it just a chronological date? Perhaps, a dislocated number that, while locating itself on a calendar, desperately flees from it. Its potency does not match its figure, its life with its letter. It explodes without referring to any leader, nor to any political party or partisan vanguard. Everything is much more precarious, but at the same time, more resistant, it can flee between the interstices of the city and permanently “evade” the “who” created by police dynamics. “Evade” designated the subtraction of the sensible life of bodies — what we will call “surface” — with respect to the governmental machinery of neoliberal reason.

As if a crack opened in the middle of the road, as if a historical continuum had stopped. The atmosphere normalized the presence of multiple sounds: sirens breaking the city buzz, helicopters machine-gunning the airspace, shots from various weapons filtering through diverse populations, never before images being monitored by images already frozen, songs — Víctor Jara ^[2] or Jorge González ^[3] — penetrating from other times to face a voracious repression; pots and pans biting into the night coming from dark windows and protesters defying the curfew with shouts and hand-to-hand combat against police or military uniforms.

Nights and days were not the same, but they were the same. A single day, hour or minute that condensed days and nights, days and nights as if there was no more difference between them. Other faces ravaged the mornings, other voices dictated the rhythm; the poor, the blind, those who had said “enough” to a life that promised nothing but debts, to an existence that had renounced all historicity, to an agony whose grief paralyzed bodies. The streets were invested with graffiti with which the crowd embraced the moment of their celebration. It all meant that the downward gaze in front of the boss could not carry on. The randomness of the clash was violent: the boss found the servant in the ferocity of a revolt, without the domestication he presupposed, without the ignorance he attributed to him, without the fear that he had instilled in him.

“No fear” is infinitely replicated on the walls of Chile. With no fear, but with rage: a whole generation that had been hardened by the silence of dictatorship imploded in the emergence of rage brought by their children. But anger not as a psychologically manageable emotion, but as a politically ungovernable affect. The entire transitional episteme was made for docile bodies. It was always a matter of modesty, of control, of learning not to demand beyond “what is possible” within a historical and political limit that became ontological. If not, the military could return or the businessmen could flee: fear provided the affective tonality to the transitional episteme. Sociologists, economists and politicians consolidated an upper echelons’ agreement around the prevalence of neoliberal reason. Everyone had to give in because everyone had to accept the established limit that was forged in the formula “as far as possible”. 

Those who raged during the dictatorship could faint in the desolation of democracy, those who fought during the dictatorship had to tame their spirits in the new transitional machinery. But injustice remained unredeemed. And it is that fissure that always challenged the transitional episteme that is actualized in the politicization of anger that ends up leading the Chilean government machine to bankruptcy.

Rage has been the ardor of an injustice that went beyond the psychological sphere captured by neoliberal confiscation and, like a blast crossing two eras at once, it left historicity in the hands of children: “He who doesn’t know about children, knows nothing of riots.” A revolt leads a people to experience its in-fancy, precisely, the inactuality with oneself, the strange thunder of its untimeliness. Usual spaces and times are shattered into a thousand pieces. And the revolt reminded us that the most decisive tremor, the adjustment with our historicity, is nothing more than a future that is inherited.

It is not a question of “future” as a horizon that owns a precise direction, but of a future in the sense of a disposition to the possibility of becoming others, in which a potency never rested on some trauma that could foreshadow it in some way, but always remained irreducible to the tricks of the law. It is a power that is nothing more than future and that only its clandestine transfer of the impersonality of a common can make it possible for bodies to know what it is that they are actually capable of. Because this potency is defined by its transmissibility and it becomes nothing more than an affirmation of life that escapes any suture provided by power. The future is inherited precisely because the bodies were able to “evade” the fear inoculated by the oligarchy during their years of dictatorship and in the convoluted transition.

The gaze of the former servant — like that passive “Indian” before the colonist — does not bow his head in front of power, but rather defies it and suffers the direct destruction of its eyes. The servant burns everything, launching himself in his martyrological potency for yesterday’s dead, for those who were defeated in the past. Rage burns everything on history’s pyre, without the authorization by the masters who once crushed the native, the worker, the student. In-fancy dislocating the civilized continuity between life and language to lead us to the cleft of popular imagination: the only barricade that connects bodies with surfaces, the new with the old, life with its forms.

The entire university apparatus, with its knowledge of order, believes that the revolt is a “social phenomenon.” A reduction to causalism by current sociology, when truly the revolt is a medium of common sensibility in which the spirits of the past embrace the incandescence of our present. Thousands of Chileans knew this when they sang “The right to live in peace” (El derecho de vivir en paz) by Victor Jara or “The dance of those left behind” (El baile de los que sobran). Uncle Ho, who fought against North American imperialism, became a surplus, a remnant, much like the municipalized students of the 1980s, ungovernable who transmitted potency from one moment to another, who inherited the future to those who could hear the intensity of their voice. That is why October 18 is not a date, but rather an artifact of spiritualism by which the defeated were able to “evade” the historical cruelty of the victors.

Revolt^[4]

One of the first days of protests I found myself at 11am in Plaza Italia. I was going to the demonstration called for 2pm, but decided to arrive earlier to get a feel for the atmosphere. After all, politics is always an atmospheric affair. I began walking from Plaza Italia towards the Andes, that is, towards the Salvador Metro station and the landscape was made up of the rubble after the battle. On Sunday, there was a large demonstration, and protests continued during the night, in the midst of the declaration of a curfew. There was the sour smell of tear gas along the road, burning the skin; burned plastic occasionally penetrated the urban ruin. Some shops were burnt, others were intact: The Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center (GAM) was intact, the Kentucky Fried Chicken branch was burnt; the theater of the University of Chile was intact, the branch of the Bank of Chile was completely burnt.

Popular violence is not a “Hobbesian violence”[5] but a violence interrupting capitalist symbolism. These are not vandals who simply destroy everything they touch, but molecular movements that, most of the time, direct their fury against the signs of power. But this does not mean, that once the revolt is in full swing, several criminal gangs will not penetrate the popular din to progressively restore exchange value from within, inoculating economy into what the revolt had made aneconomical. Precisely: every revolt runs at a loss. The aneconomy of the revolt interrupts “the normal flow” of the country’s capital, the institutions stop working, temporality is strongly suspended. The upsetting of reality, a necessary elixir of revolt, is a sign that a people has broken out as a revolt. 

Because no revolt carries with it the sign of purity. It is dirty, full of mixtures that flourish in the suspension of historical time it has opened. Every revolt fights against its own centrifugal forces, because its power is measured in the ability to remove sovereign violence that, however, tries to capture it permanently. For this reason, a revolt must bring into play an untimely relationship with the present. It never fits with itself because it wildly differs from itself. We cannot demand purity and hygiene from a revolt, because all dynamics oriented towards cleansing or purification symbolize the triumph of sacrificial or sovereign violence that the revolt is destituting. It is sacrifice that purifies, sacrifice that cleanses the world to slaughter the goats that crystallize the new evil on earth.

Sacrifice is precisely the weapon of all reactionary politics, waiting like a shadow within the state formula: “no people has ever doubted that there was an expiatory virtue in the effusion of blood,” wrote Joseph De Maistre in his Treatise on sacrifices.[6] Precisely because the violence of the revolt deposes the sacrificial dynamic, because in it the martyrological power is at stake, that is, the one that seals without blood the revocation of all sovereignty: “A political execution”, asserts Paul W. Kahn, “read as an act of martyrdom, proclaims the weakness, not the strength of the state.”[7] This is because martyrdom threatens to “expose the state and its claim to authority as nothing.” [8] Popular violence is martyrological in this sense: its potency destitutes [9] sovereign violence, exposing its weakness and dissolving its claim to authority as nothingness.

It does not destroy, but destitutes; it does not establish, but revokes. It breaks the subject supposed to know that has erected the discourse, making it fall like a mask, and it can do nothing but exercise sacrificial violence so as to restore order. All calls from the government and the occasional political actor to dialogue are based on the sacrificial fiction, in which all the agents in conflict get solved in the same general equivalent: police lives are as much of a victim of violence as those of citizens who have fallen under the military bullet or police hunt. The government’s discourse is sacrificial precisely when it condemns violence “wherever it comes from.” This sets it up to exercise the greatest violence of all — sovereign violence precisely — which is such because it can crush all the other types of violence that it considers simply sectorial.

But in addition, the sacrificial paradigm raised by the state discourse restores, in turn, capital, to the extent that it restores the equivalent codification that enables state violence to be reconciled in the same unit with the torn revolt of a citizenry out in the open. The martyr breaks sacrifice to the same extent that it exposes its nothingness. Could we say that the notion of sovereignty once proposed by philosopher Georges Bataille is that of a true and properly martyrological sovereignty inasmuch as it implodes the moment it is exercised? [10] And if this is so, would not the Schmittian conception of sovereignty be one that has not assumed the radical nature of its concept, that has never lived up to what it proclaims? [11]

In any case, the term “martyrdom” has had a bad name because, from my point of view, it has always been conceived under the sacrificial aura or, what is the same, it has always been represented from the point of view of the victors who appropriated its concept to capitalize on it in terms of the restitution of order. Using the well-known Benjaminian distinction between pure and mythical violence, I would like to differentiate martyrdom from sacrifice and maintain that the first refers to a popular violence of a redemptive and destituent nature that establishes or preserves nothing and, the latter is oligarchic violence oriented towards the establishment and preservation of order.

In this light, a revolt is martyrological and not sacrificial, and brings with it the courage of living labor in which the affirmation of a potency is played out, rather than the consolidation of power. Beyond the purification of liberal discourse that condemns all violence, wherever it comes from, thereby trying to exempt itself from sacrificial dynamics while reproducing them, it is necessary to vindicate the violence opened up by the revolt that, however, suspends the sacrificial violence that, time and again, does nothing more than exert its mythical death power. It is not a matter of aestheticizing it, but to assume the materiality with which it denounces the injustice of the current state of affairs, exposing sovereign power to the nakedness of its nothingness.

A revolt is never welcome. Crowds don’t know whether to laugh or cry in front of it. They don’t know if it happens for better or worse, precisely because it does not obey any telos or any guarantee to the extent that it exposes the fragility of our bodies before history’s elements. But a revolt never comes in a uniform shape or mode, but is always different, multiple and intense. It is also unpredictable. All efforts to identify its causes always come to a limit. Knowledge goes bankrupt. And suddenly, everyone remembers the thousand reports that kept on showing the misery of our conditions. But at such a moment, we wonder: if the conditions were already there, why did the fuse light at this moment? Why not before or after? Between the conditions and their outbreak, something key always takes place: a murder, an act of radical injustice against certain bodies, committed by the exercise of State violence.

In the Arab Spring, the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in front of the police station was the imaginal operator that triggered the revolt. In Chile on October 18, thousands of high school students who had evaded the Metro turnstiles were brutally repressed by the police force. Five days after the proclamation of the State of Constitutional Exception, accompanied a nightly curfew apparatus, national and international Human Rights organizations were counting the death toll by State agents as the fierce way in which sacrificial violence was being deployed in the streets of a flooded city.

The revolt breaks out in various ways, an organization can take over — such as the one articulated today by Unidad Social. Like the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, which articulated a minimum organization during the 1987 Palestinian intifada, Unidad Social could also become an “agency” (a “support” according to Judith Butler) [12] born out of the revolt itself to keep its work alive and not to confiscate it in a dead and completely bankrupt representational apparatus. Because, in the midst of the bankruptcy of a state model violently implemented in 1973, we are witnessing a beginning. 

We do not know what will happen or how events will unfold. But in the face of the devastation wrought by the dictatorship and later by the transition, directing its efforts to separate bodies from their potency, lives from their images, in a neutralization process, the revolt restored their intensity. Faced with the neoliberal body confiscated by the company form — turned “to prey”, said Guadalupe Santa Cruz — the revolt restored a body potency. The fascination experienced by the participants in a political process such as this is entirely linked to the surprise that awaits the conscience — that poor counselor — of what a body can do, what bodies can do. Because the revolt throws us into this: a hand-to-hand combat.

We never imagined what our bodies could do, we were never aware of it. How could we be, if consciousness — that representational apparatus — does nothing more than instill fear in us and push us to calculate our every movement? The revolt is aneconomic precisely because it does not calculate and always runs at a loss. We have already lost comrades in struggle, eyes, academic calendars, international events (APEC-COP 25) and we will continue to lose. Everything has been suspended, then, as Furio Jesi saw: unlike a revolution, a revolt implies the “suspension of historical time.” [13] A suspension that brings with it a radical loss, an unconditional expenditure that is impossible to foresee, but also the opening of a beginning in which we can re-imagine another historical era. It is precisely that beginning that we must embrace today with all the forces of history. Without it, we will not only be left without a future or a past, but above all we will be stripped of the heat of a present.

Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s The Future is Inherited is now available in English from les presses du réel

Images: Tomas Munita

Notes

1. First published in El Desconcierto on November 27, 2019. 

2. Victor Jara (1932-1973) was a Chilean theater director, actor, playwright and folklore researcher, but generally known as a singer-songwriter, who actively participated in the Popular Unity’s presidential campaign. He was arrested after the coup in 1973 and was sent to the “Estadio Chile” (currently called “Víctor Jara Stadium”) where he was tortured and killed by the military. One of his most relevant songs was “The right to live in peace”, which Jara wrote inspired by Ho Chi Min and the Vietnam War. This song was massively sung during the recent protests along the country. —Editorial note.

3. Jorge González was the leader of Los Prisioneros, one of the main musical bands in recent Chilean history. Formed during the 1980s, they became a critical voice to the political and social order established by the dictatorship. One of their key songs was “The dance of those left behind”, which was massively sung during the protests in Plaza Dignidad. —Editorial note.

4. Originally published in Ficción de la Razón on October 29, 2019, as part of the special dossier “Estado generales de emergencia” coordinated by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and Mauricio Amar.

5. José Joaquín Brunner. Democracia, violencia y perspectivas futuras. Online here.

6. Joseph De Maistre. Tratado sobre los sacrificios. México, Sexto Piso, 2009, 24-25.     

7. Walter Benjamin, “On the Critique of Violence.”  

8. Paul W. Kahn. El liberalismo en su lugar. Santiago, Universidad Diego Portales, 2018, 112. 

9. The English edition incorrectly renders “destitutes/destituent” throughout as “dismisses.” —Note added by Ill Will.↰

10. Georges Bataille. Lo que entiendo por soberanía. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1996. 

11. Carl Schmitt. Teología política. Cuatro ensayos sobre el concepto de soberanía. Buenos Aires, Struhart y Cia., 2005. 

12. Judith Butler. Cuerpos aliados y lucha política. Hacia una teoría performativa de la asamblea. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2017.

13. Furio Jesi. Spartakus. The Symbology of Revolt, Translated by Alberto Toscano, Seagull Books, Ch. 2. Online here. 

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SOURCE: IllWill

The post Fragments of a Chile in Revolt- Rodrigo Karmy Bolton appeared first on Void Network.

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On the 5th of May last the celebration of the centenary of the French Revolution began by the commemoration of the opening of the States-General at Versailles, at the same date, in the memorable year of 1789. And Paris—that city which in January last so clearly manifested its dissatisfaction with Parliamentary rule—heartily joined in the festivities organized to celebrate a day when parliamentary institutions, crossing the Channel, went to take firm root on the Continent. Must we see in the enthusiasm of the Parisians one of those seeming contradictions which are so common in the complicated life of large human agglomerations? Or was it the irresistible attraction of a spring festival which induced the Parisians to rush in flocks to Versailles? Or was it a manifestation intended to show that Paris proposes brilliantly to commemorate the Revolution, and the more so as the monarchies of Europe do not conceal their disgust at the very remembrance of such an event? Let it be as it may. At any rate, one who surveys the whole of the great commotion which visited France at the end of last century and exercised so powerful an influence upon the development of Europe during the next hundred years, cannot but look at the gatherings of the States-General on the 5th of May, 1789, as a decisive step in the development of the great revolutionary movement.

True that long before that date France was already in full insurrection. It is known that the advent of Louis the Sixteenth to the throne was the signal for a series of famine outbreaks which lasted till 1783. Then came a period of relative tranquility. But from 1786, and especially from 1788, the outbreaks began again with a new force. Famine was the leading motive of the former series; it played an important part in the new series as well, but the refusal to pay the feudal taxes was its distinctive feature. Small outbreaks became all but general from January 1789; from the month of March the feudal rents were no longer paid, and Taine, who has consulted the archives, speaks of at least three hundred outbreaks which took place since the beginning of the year. The first ‘Jacquerie’ had thus begun long before the gathering of the States-General, long before the memorable events by which the tiers état announced its firm resolution of no longer leaving political power in the hands of the Court.

However, a Jacquerie is not a revolution, though it be as terrible as that of Pugatchoff; nor is a simple change of government, like those which took place in 1830 and 1848, a revolution. The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties—both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances—but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way—all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely-spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organization—an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions. The convocation of the States-General at a moment when the French peasantry was already in open revolt gave the second element. Ten years before, the meeting of the representatives of the nation might have prevented the revolution; it would have certainly given it another character; but now, amid the peasant revolt, it meant the beginning of a revolutionary period. The revolt of the middle classes joining hands with the revolt of the peasants was a revolution.

The history of the French Revolution has been written and re-written. We know the slightest details of the drama played on the stages of the National Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the Convention. The parliamentary history of the movement is fully elaborated. But its popular history has never been attempted to be written. So we must not wonder that even upon such a simple subject as the condition of rural France before 1789 opinions still remain discordant.

The fact is, that it was not the Revolution which abolished serfdom in France, as is sometimes maintained. Serfdom—that is, the bondage to the soil—had already disappeared long before. In 1788, there remained no more than 80,000 mainmortables in the Jura, and less than 1,500,000 all over France; and even these mainmortables were not serfs in the real acceptance of the word. As to the great bulk of the French peasantry, they no longer knew the yoke of serfdom. But, like the Russian peasants of our days, they had to pay, both in money and obligatory work, for their personal liberty. These obligations were exceedingly heavy, but not arbitrary: they were inscribed in the terriers which, later on, became the subject of such fury on the part of the peasants.

Besides, the manorial jurisdiction had been maintained to a very great extent; and when an old woman was bequeathing to her heirs an old woolen skirt and two chestnut trees’—I have seen such wills—she had to pay to the bailiff of the noble et généreuse dame du château, or the noble et généreux seigneur, a heavy tax.

True, that since the time of Turgot many of the feudal obligations were paid no longer. The governors of the provinces refused to support those claims of the landlords which they considered as mere exactions. But the heavier taxes, which represented a real value for the landlord or his sub-tenant, had to be paid in full, and they were ruining the peasants, just as the redemption-tax is now raining the Russian peasantry. So there is not a word of exaggeration in the dark pictures of village-life which we find in the introductory chapter of nearly every history of the Revolution; but there is also no exaggeration in the assertion that in each village there were individual peasants who were on the road to prosperity, and therefore were the more anxious to shake off the yoke of feudality. Both types represented by Erckmann-Chatrian—that of a bourgeois du village and that of a misery-stricken peasant—are true types. From the former the tiers état borrowed its real force; while the bands of insurgents which from January 1789 were extorting from the nobles the renouncement of the obligations inscribed in the terriers were recruited among the down-trodden masses who had but a mud-hut to live in, and chestnuts and occasional gleanings to live upon.

The same was true with regard to the cities. The feudal rights existed in the cities, as well as in the villages, and the poorest classes of the towns were as burdened by feudal taxes as the peasants. The right of patrimonial jurisdiction was in full vigor, and the houses of the artisans and workers had to pay the same feudal taxes on inheritance and sellings as the peasants’ houses; while many towns were bound to pay forever a tribute for the redemption of their former feudal submission. Moreover, most cities had to pay the king the don gratuit for the right of maintaining a shadow of municipal independence, and the whole burden of the taxes fell upon the poorer classes. If we add to these features the heavy royal taxes, the contributions in statute labor, the heavy tax on salt, and so forth, the arbitrariness of the functionaries, the heavy expenses in the law-courts, and the impossibility for a roturier of finding justice against a hereditary bourgeois or a noble, and all kinds of oppression, we shall have an idea of the condition of the poorer classes before 1789.

I need hardly mention the great intellectual movement which preceded the Revolution. No other period in the history of thought has so much been discussed, or is so well known, as that glorious era of revival which was born in this country, and after having been systematized and popularized in France, exercised so powerful an influence upon the minds and actions of the political leaders of the period. Full freedom of analysis; full confidence in humanity, and complete disdain of the inherited institutions which spoil human nature; the equality of all men, irrespective of their birth; equality before the law; Roman veneration for the law, and obligatory submission of every citizen—be he king or peasant—to the will of the nation, supposed to be expressed by its elected representatives; full freedom of contract and full freedom of religious opinions: all that, carefully elaborated into a system by the eminently systematic French mind, professed with the fanaticism of neophytes, ready to transport the results of their philosophical convictions into life—all this is well known. But what chiefly interests the historian is not so much the development of thought itself as the causes which determined the transition from thought to action—the circumstances which permitted men of thought to pass from mere criticism and theoretical elaboration to the application in life of the ideal which had grown out of their criticism. To induce men to pass from mere theory to action, there must be some hope of being able to realize their ideas. That hope was raised by the peasants’ outbreaks, by the discontent of the middle classes, and by the thus resulting necessity of making an appeal to the nation for the reform of its institutions.

It is well worthy of note that the writings of the most popular philosophers and political writers of the time were imbued to a great extent with what now constitutes the essence of Socialism. The word was not known then, but the ideas were much more widely spread than is generally believed. The writings of Rousseau and Diderot are full of socialistic ideas; Sieyès expressed some of them in most vigorous terms; and the saying la propriété c’est le vol, which later on became the beginning of the fame of Proudhon, was the title of a pamphlet written by the Girondist Brissot. Nationalization of land is not unfrequently met with in the pamphlets; the toiling masses are unanimously recognized as the real builders of national welfare, and ‘the people’ becomes a subject of idealization, not in Rousseau’s romances only, but also in a mass of novels and on the stage. All those writings had the widest circulation; their teachings penetrated into the slums and the mud-huts; and, together with the promises of the privileged classes and many secondary causes, they maintained in the masses the hopes of a near change. ‘I do not know what will happen, but something will happen some time soon,’ an old woman said to Arthur Young as he was traveling over France on the eve of the Revolution; and that was the expression of the state of minds all over France. Hopes of change were ripe amid the toiling masses; they had been maintained for years, but they had always been deceived. They had been renewed by the declarations of nobility during the Assemblées des Notables—and deceived again. And so, when the terrible winter of 1788 and the famine came, while the revolts of the Parliaments were stimulating hopes, the revolt of the peasants took the character of a general outbreak.

The French Revolution already has its legend, and that legend runs as follows:—

On the 12th of July [I omit the facts anterior to that date] the fall of Necker’s Ministry became known. That foolish step of the Court provoked the outbreak in Paris which led to the fall of the Bastille. As soon as the news reached the provinces, similar outbreaks began in the cities and spread into the villages. Many castles of the nobility were burned. Then, during the famous night of the 4th of August, the nobility and the clergy abdicated their feudal rights. Feudalism was abolished. Since that time the struggle continued between the national representation and the Court, and terminated in the defeat of the aristocracy and the royal authority. As to the peasants’ outbreaks which continued after the 4th of August, they were—the legend says—the work of mere robbers, inspired with the sole desire of plunder, when they were not instigated by the Court, the nobles, and the English. At any rate, they had no reason to continue since the feudal rights had been abolished, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man had become the basis of the French Constitution.

To begin with, the outbreak of the 14th of July was not caused by the fall of Necker’s Ministry.[1] It was an outbreak of the starving masses of Paris, and it began, with the watchword ‘Bread!’ three days before the fall of Necker; but the middle classes, aware of the coup d’état prepared by the Court, took advantage of it, supported it, and directed it against the stronghold of royalty in Paris—the Bastille. When the danger was over, and the Bastille taken, their armed militia crushed the popular movement, which was taking the character of a general revolt of the poor against the rich. In that outbreak, which had so decisive a meaning for the subsequent events, Paris did not take the lead, but followed in the wake of the provinces. However, the success of the outbreak at Paris provoked many similar outbreaks against the privileged classes in the provincial towns, and it encouraged the peasants, especially in the province of Dauphiné; but the Jacquerie, as said, had already begun long before, and Chassin is quite right in saying that if Paris had been defeated on the 14th of July, the outbreak of the peasants would have continued nevertheless.

As to the night of the 4th of August, it is a pity to destroy so gracious a legend, but the fact is that during that night the feudal rights were abolished in words only. All that display of patriotic abnegation was not serious, even if it was sincere, because already on the 6th of August the Assembly reexamined its work and introduced the subtle distinction between the personal, humiliating obligations of the peasantry, and the real ones which represented a pecuniary interest for the landlords. And while the decree of the National Assembly begins with the words ‘The National Assembly entirely abolishes the feudal system,’ we learn from the end of the same decree that the personal servitudes only are abolished, while the real obligations can be redeemed—on such conditions as will be established later on. And thus the peasants, mizerable as they were, had to pay, in addition to all taxes old and new, a redemption the amount of which was not even fixed, but was left to an agreement between the peasants and the landlords. The decrees were thus much more like a declaration of principles than a law. Nay, even these decrees were not promulgated till the end of September, and the promulgation consisted in simply sending them to the Courts of Justice together with the observations of the king.

It is evident that such concessions could not satisfy the peasants. ‘Our villages are most dissatisfied with the decree upon the feudal rights,’ Madame Roland wrote in May 1790. A reform will be necessary, otherwise the castles will burn again.’ But the longed-for reforms did not come. The question as to the feudal rights remained unsettled, and one who has grown accustomed to the legend is quite bewildered as he finds, under the date of 18th of June, 1790, a decree according to which ‘the tithes, both feudal and ecclesiastical’ (and we know that the tithes sometimes meant one fourth of the crop) had to be paid for the current year,’ in the usual way that is, in effects and to the usual amount; that the champarts, terrages, and agriers comptants[2] had to be paid in the same way ‘until redeemed’; and that any attack upon these rights, ‘either in writing or in speech, or by menaces’ should be punished in the severest way—that is, in all appearance, by hard labor or death. In fact, the abolition of the feudal rights without redemption was voted only in June 1792, and that vote was simply snatched from the Legislative Assembly while two hundred of its members were not present.

The peasants thus had no other means of obtaining a real abolition of feudal rights than themselves to compel the landlords to abandon their rights, or to storm the castles and burn the terriers. So the Jacquerie continued for nearly four years. But as soon as the middle classes had obtained their first successes over royalty in 1789, and as soon as they had armed their militia, they began to suppress the peasants’ outbreaks with a cruelty worthy of the old monarchy. The municipalities, at the head of the bourgeois militia, exterminated the bands of peasants. In the Dauphiné, where the revolt was severest, the grand-prévôt was traveling over the villages by the end of 1789, and pitilessly hanging the ‘rebels’—the more so as those brigands did not respect the castles of the ‘patriots’ and attacked them as well as the castles of the noble supporters of the king.[3]

Another feature, relative to the common-lands, also must be mentioned under this head, because some of my readers may not be aware that the communal possession and administration of commonlands, the communal assembly of all householders of the village (the mir, I should say) and the common liability for the payment of taxes had persisted in France till the reforms of Turgot.[4] It was Turgot who substituted for the communal assembly (which he found ‘too noisy’) elected bodies of notables, which soon became, in the hands of the richer bourgeois du village, an instrument for taking possession of the common-lands. A good deal of the common-lands having been enclosed both in this way, as well as in former times by the landlords, one of the aims of the peasants’ outbreaks was to restore to the commons the possession of their lands; but the National Assembly took no notice of that desire. On the contrary, it authorized (on the 1st of August, 1791) the sale of the common-lands, which simply meant the spoliation of the poorer inhabitants of the villages of their last means of existence, for the enrichment of the wealthier peasants. One year later the sale of the common-lands was suspended by a new law, but that law permitted their division between the richer peasants, to the exclusion of the proletarians; and it was not before the 10th of June, 1793, that the Convention, while ordering the communes to take possession of the lands arbitrarily enclosed in former times, enjoined them either to keep them undivided, or, in case the division be demanded by two-thirds of the inhabitants of the commune, to divide them between all inhabitants, rich and poor. The legislation about the common-lands was thus another cause of discontent which maintained the agitation, and continually resulted in fresh outbreaks till the question was settled in 1793. As to the towns, the outbreaks of the poorer classes became the more unavoidable since the National Assembly endowed the municipalities with wide powers, while the real power remained in the hands of a few privileged bourgeois and nobles.

I have been compelled to enter into these details—not always clearly understood—because the uprising of the peasants and the urban proletarians for the abolition of the last relics of feudal servitude was the real ground upon which the Revolution throve. That uprising permitted the great battle between the middle class and the Court to be fought; it prevented any solid government from being instituted for nearly five years, and thus enabled the middle classes to seize political power and to prepare the elements for its ulterior organization on a democratic basis. The middle classes alternately favored and opposed those uprisings. They used the popular discontent as a battering-ram against monarchy, but at the same time they were always anxious to maintain the popular wave in such a channel as not to compromise the privileges which they shared in common with the nobles or had acquired during the Revolution.

The National Assembly of 1789 boldly abolished in principle most of the odious privileges of the old régime. Proceeding in a most systematic way, it destroyed one after the other the old mediæval institutions and embodied its political principles in the shape of laws which are mostly distinguished by a remarkable lucidity of style and clearness of conception. It proclaimed the rights of the citizen and it elaborated a constitution; it elaborated also a provincial and a communal organization based on the principle of equality before the law. It abolished for ever the distinction between the three different ‘orders,’ and laid the bases of a complete reform of taxation; the titles of nobility were abolished; the Church was disendowed, rendered a department of the State, and its estates seized as a guarantee of national loans; the army was reorganized so as to make of it an instrument of national defense; and a judicial organization which could be advantageously contrasted with the present judicial organization of France was promulgated. Over-centralization had been avoided in all those schemes. The work was immense; it was performed by able hands; and many a historian, while passing in review the work of the National Assembly, has been brought to ask himself, Why the Revolution did not stop there? Why a second revolution was added to the first?

The answer is simple. Because otherwise all that symmetrical structure would have remained what it was, a dead letter, a simple declaration of principles, very interesting for posterity, but without any moment for the time being. Because there is an immense, often immeasurable, distance between a law and its application in life—a distance which is great even in the centralized, carefully organized States of our days, but was immense in a State like old France, which represented the most curious mixture of conflicting institutions inherited from several different historical epochs. Who was to execute those laws? In our modern States a law finds a ready centralized administration to execute it, and a whole army to enforce it in case of need. But nothing of the kind existed in 1789; the very organization for enforcing laws had to be created, and the law had to be enforced before reaction could set in and annihilate all reformatory work. Therefore, the so-called ‘second revolution’ was not a second revolution at all; it was simply the means for transforming into facts the theories proclaimed by the National Assembly.

As to the opposition which the new measures met with in the privileged classes, far from having been overrated by historians, it never has been fully told. The conspiracies of the Court are pretty well known. What formerly were represented as so many calumnies circulated by the liberal historians have now become historical facts. No serious student of the period will doubt any more that each of the uprisings in Paris was an answer to some coup d’état schemed by the Court. The appeal to the foreigner to invade France is no longer a matter of doubt. Besides, new materials are steadily coming to light to show the extension of the conspiracies planned to oppose the Revolution; and it is now known that if the Protestants in Southern France had not so heartily joined the Revolution, two Vendées, instead of one, would have had to be combated. But the resistance of the Vendées was but a trifle in comparison with the resistance which every act of even the National Assembly, (not to speak of those of the subsequent assemblies) met with in each provincial directoire, in each town, large or small. When asked by the German historian Schlosser, ‘How was it possible that Robespierre could keep all France in his hands?’ the Abbé Grégoire retorted: ‘Why, in each village there was its Robespierre!’ Surely so, but in each town, in each castle and in each bishop’s palace, there was also its Coblentz—its center of resistance of the old system. Hence the terrible struggles for the conquest of municipalities which we see all through the revolutionary period, the denunciations, the armed attacks, the local executions. Take, for instance, so simple a thing as the assessment of the income-tax, which had been entrusted to the municipalities. As long as the municipality remained in the hands of a few rich people from the privileged classes, the new taxation was not introduced; then, the proletarians took possession of the municipality, named their own men, and proceeded to realize the platonic declarations of the National Assembly. But if the royalists again obtained possession of the municipal power, they pitilessly executed the popular leaders, reintroduced the old system, and freed themselves from the burden of the taxes.

Moreover, the Revolution was far from universal. It had found warm followers in the east, the north-east, and the south-east of France, but over more than one-half of the territory either hostility or indifference prevailed, and in the best case men were waiting the issue of the events in order to take the side of the party which came out victorious; while the State expenses were growing every day, and the most strenuous efforts were required to cope with the foreign invasions.[5]

So it becomes evident that the National and the Legislative Assemblies had merely expressed desiderata, and that in order to transscribe those desiderata into facts, the ‘second revolution’ was rendered necessary on account of the resistance opposed to any innovation by adherents of the old régime. Not only had the flight of the king and the conspiracies of the Court rendered the republic a necessity; but the proclamation of the republic was needful in order to guarantee to France that it should not return under the rule of the old aristocracy—just as the proclamation of the Commune in 1871 proved to be the means of preventing the return of Monarchy after the disasters of the German war. There was a moment of relaxation of revolutionary energy, especially in 1791. That moment could have been utilized for strengthening what had been elaborated by the National Assembly. If the nobility and the Court had understood the necessity of concessions, and made them, they most probably would have saved part of their privileges. But they admitted nothing save a return, pure and simple, to the old state of affairs. Instead of accepting the compromise which the middle classes were only too willing to come to, they called foreign armies in order to reestablish the whole system in full. They concocted their foolish schemes of the flight of the king, and threatened to take a bloody revenge upon those who had disturbed them in the enjoyment of their former rights. In such circumstances there remained nothing but to fight, and the fight was fought to the bitter end.

Nay, the terrible struggles between revolutionists themselves in the Convention, which have been often represented as an outcome of so many personal rivalries, were nothing but the logical development of the same necessity. The foolishness of the nobility and the Court rendered the very name of royalty hateful. Royalty meant no other program than a destruction, with the help of foreigners, of even the modest reformatory work that had been done by the first Assembly of the States-General. A new enthusiasm only, a new revival of the revolutionary energy, could save the little that had been done; but the Girondists did not understand that necessity. They could not see that the return of Monarchy had to be prevented in order to give to the new institutions time to take root; that the peasant ought to plow for the first time his newly conquered field in order to be ready to fight for it; that the new judge, the new municipality, the new tax-gatherer had to be accustomed to their functions, and that the nation as a whole had to shake off its former habits of servility and submissiveness. The Girondists did not understand that, and they fell victims of their irresoluteness. Even so moderate an historian as Mignet, who, however, had the advantage of writing under the fresh impression of the epoch, judiciously remarks that a sure return to the old régime, a victory of the coalition and the dismemberment of France would have followed if the Commune of Paris had not taken the upper hand on the 31st of May, 1793, when the Girondists were arrested and sent to the scaffold. Without fanaticism, without the law of maximum and the requisitions, the young republic never would have succeeded in repelling the invaders and the old régime which found a refuge in their camp. The struggle between the parties in the Convention was not a struggle for personal domination: it was a struggle to settle the question how far the Revolution should go. Should it succumb, or live to insure its work? And without the temporary triumph of Marat and the Commune of Paris, the Revolution would have been terminated in May 1793.

In fact, the Revolution lived as long as the double current of popular outbreaks in the villages and the towns continued. When the feudal institutions were totally destroyed both in towns and the country, and the famous decree of the Convention ordered the burning all over France of all papers relative to the feudal system, the movement began to exhaust its energy. Those who had taken possession of the 1,210,000 estates (representing one-third of the territory of France), which had changed hands during the Revolution, hastened to enjoy the benefits of their newly acquired property. Those who had enriched themselves by all descriptions of speculations monopolized the fruits of the rich crops of 1793, and starved the cities. The proletarians of the cities thus saw themselves reduced to the same misery as before. The men who had never refused to respond to the appeals of the middle classes when an insurrection had to be opposed to a conspiracy of the nobles, were reduced to starvation again.

A third revolution, having a kind of vague Socialism for its economical program, and the full independence of the communes instead of the dictatorship of the Convention as a program of political organization, was ripening. But it was not at the end of a revolution so vast as the preceding that a new movement could have a chance of success. Besides, the middle classes were decided not to part with the conquered privileges, and the Jacobins were too preoccupied with definitely establishing the building they had so vigorously defended against its enemies. The young Socialist party was defeated, and its chief representatives followed the Girondists on the scaffold.

From that moment the masses of Paris abandoned the Revolution. They unwillingly supported the Reign of Terror. The people can resort to massacres in a moment of despair; but it cannot support the daily executions performed in cold blood with the appearance of law. These legal executions weighed upon the Parisians. In fact, the Revolution had already come to an end, and when a last attempt was made to provoke an insurrection in favor of Robespierre and against the other members of the Committee of Salut public, the people of Paris did not answer to the appeal. The contre-révolution [Counter-Revolution], headed by the returned royalists and the muscadins, had its hands free: the newly-enriched middle classes hastened to enjoy the fruits of their victory and began the orgies of the Directoire, and the urban proletarians could only do their best not to succumb to starvation in the expectation of a new revolution in which fraternity and equality would be vain words no more.

And now let us cast a glance at the consequences of the Revolution. Here we meet in the first place with the usual objection: ‘What was the use,’ it is said, ‘of all that bloodshed and disturbance if it had to result in the despotism of a Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons?’ The answer to that current remark has already been given in the preceding pages. The abolition of institutions which were doomed by history to disappear being so obstinately opposed, bloodshed and disturbances became an historical necessity.

As to those who would like to know what were the results of the Revolution, we would merely say to them: Go and travel over France, call at the peasants’ houses, examine into the economical conditions of the peasantry for the last fifty years, and compare them with what they were a hundred years ago; and if you like to realize those conditions of the past in a concrete way, go to Russia; there you will see conditions very much the same as those which prevailed in France before 1789. Go especially at a time (like the year 1881) when a third part of the country is suffering from a scarcity of grain, and is feeding on bark and grass mixed with some flour. There, on the fertile soil of south-eastern Russia, you will understand the famous words of the French royal intendant who advised starving peasants to eat grass if they were hungry; because there you might see (as it was in 1881) whole villages living on mountain-spinach, and sending their people to fetch some of it from a neighboring province. There you would see the ruined but arrogant nobility preventing the peasant from making use of the uncultivated land; the arbitrariness of the functionaries; the lawlessness of the ministers; you would find the Bastille at Schlüsselburg, and you would have an insight into ‘old France.’ Personal rule returned in France with Napoleon, but not the feudal institutions. Neither the laws promulgated under the Bourbons nor even the White Terror could take the land from the peasants, nor reintroduce the feudal servitudes, nor reintegrate the old feudal organization of the cities. And if now, especially during the last twenty years, the French peasants have again to complain of the accumulation of land in the hands of capitalists, they have enjoyed, at least for more than fifty years, a period of relative prosperity which has made the real might of the French nation. More than that, the whole aspect of the nation has changed. The ideas, the conceptions, the whole mode of thinking and acting are no longer those of the last century. Instead of coming exhausted out of the Napoleonic wars, France came out of them a fresh, consolidated nation, full of force—a nation which soon took the lead of European civilization. The period of reaction was soon over, and in 1848 France already made an attempt towards the establishment of a Socialist Republic. As to the degrading rule of Napoleon the Third, it was the necessary consequence of the unsuccessful revolution of 1848, and bourgeois Imperialism would appear in any other nation, if that nation repeated the errors of our French forerunners by attempting the State organization of labor.

The influence exercised by the French Revolution on European thought and institutions was immense. The revolutionary armies of sans-culottes gave to serfdom a mortal blow all over Europe. Their astonishing successes were not due to the military genius of Napoleon, but to the abolition of serfdom inscribed on the tricolor flag. And they succeeded only so far as they brought with them the downfall of feudalism. Even the Russian peasants considered the approach of the French army as a message of liberation from the yoke of servitude. But Napoleon, when he approached Russia, was already too much of an emperor. Even in Poland the liberation of the serfs was merely nominal: it was not even attempted in Russia; and the bloodiest battle on record, taking place at Borodino, put an end to the victorious revolutionary campaign.

The military campaign did not extend the full abolition of serfdom far beyond the eastern frontiers of France. But the French Revolution had given the watchword to the century, and this watchword was: the abolition of serfdom, leading to capitalist rule; and the abolition of absolute power, leading to parliamentary institutions. The wave slowly rolled east, and these two reforms have constituted the very essence of European history during our century. The abolition of serfdom in Germany which was begun in 1811 was accomplished after 1848; Russia abolished it in 1861; the Balkan States in 1878. The cycle was thus completed, and personal servitude disappeared in Europe. On the other hand, the necessary corollary of the above reform, the abolition of Court rule, which took a hundred years to cross the Channel, took another hundred years to spread through Europe. Even the Balkan States have parliamentary institutions, and Russia is now alone in maintaining absolute rule—a phantom of absolute rule. The two fundamental principles enunciated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man have thus been applied almost in full. And if liberty, equality, and fraternity do not yet reign in Europe, — we must look for some important omission in that famous Declaration.

All the sufferings which France underwent during the Revolution and the subsequent wars necessarily suggest the question whether that revolution may not be the last of the series of revolutions which has marked the ends of each of the last five centuries.

One might wish it, but when we take into consideration the state of minds in Europe, the immense agrarian question which has suddenly grown up in all countries, the still greater social problem which imperiously demands a solution, the difficulties put in the way of that solution, the indifference of the privileged classes which does not fall far short of the indifference of the French nobility, and, finally, the great dispute arising between the individual and the State, we cannot but foresee the approach of a great commotion in Europe, with this difference, that it cannot be limited to one country only but is likely to become international, like the uprising of 1848, although it is sure to assume different characters in different countries.

As to France, its present system of government is so undermined that it can hardly be expected to live more than the usual two decades which represent the maximum duration of a government in France during our century. However, historical previsions cannot go so far as to foretell the dates of coming events. The character of the next movement in France is almost sure to be in the direction of independent federated communes trying to introduce a life based on socialist principles. The fundamental principle bequeathed by the French Revolution is full freedom of choice of occupation and freedom of contracts; but neither can be realized as long as the necessaries for production remain the property of the few. To realize those conditions will surely be the aim of the future revolutions. As to whether any of them will take the acute character of the great movement of the last century, all will depend upon the intelligence of the privileged classes, and their capacities for understanding in time the importance of the historical moment we are living in. One thing, however, seems certain: namely, that in no country can the privileged classes of our times be as foolish as the privileged classes were in France a hundred years ago.

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[1] One may see in the Moniteur that the disorders began on the 6th of July, amid the twenty thousand unemployed engaged in relief-works at Montmartre. Two days later, the poorer classes of the suburbs, together with the same unemployed, attempted to burn the octrois. Encounters with the troops are mentioned in the Moniteur under the 10th of July; and on the 11th of July the people of the suburbs burned the octroi of Chaussée d’Antin. Next day, when the departure of Necker became known, the middle classes took advantage of the movement, organized it, and directed it against royalty.

[2] The obligation of giving a certain amount of the crop to the landlord.

[3] Twenty peasants were hanged in the Dauphiné, twelve at Douai, eighty at Lyons, and so on (Buchez et Rous, ii.). The National Assembly fully approved the summary justice of the municipalities. The version representing the revolted peasants as paid robbers already appears in the history written by the ‘Amis de la Liberté,’ as well as in the Histoire Parlementaire, by Buchez and Itoux.

[4] For more details see Babeau’s Le Village sous l’Ancien Régime, and La Ville sous l’Ancien Régime. The general assembly of all inhabitants was maintained in smaller towns till 1784.

[5] I once drew a map on which I marked the localities the names of which occur in connection with insurrections in general works and works of local history of France during the Revolution. It appeared that only the north-eastern, eastern, and south- eastern parts of France were marked on my map, and that sporadic spots only occurred in western and central France. When I saw, later on, the map on which the electoral districts which had reelected ‘the three hundred and sixty-three ‘ (under McMahon’s presidency) were represented by a special color, I was struck with the likeness of both maps. Revolutionary traditions are transmitted, like all other kinds of tradition.

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