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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recognizing ourselves

“Nos costó tanto encontrarnos, no nos soltemos”ⁱ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birth of our power

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

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

The margins attack the center

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the margins to the people

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fall of the regime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan we missed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the emergency brake

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

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

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

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

Behind every fascism lies a failed revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

The age of exhaustion

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

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

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

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

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

A State of Emergency in every state

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the horizon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning exile into a position of attack

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

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

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

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

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

Deadly paths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arrival in the host country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasing circulations

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalism from below

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem of ‘solidarity’

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

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

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

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

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

Mutual aid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extending the minga worldwide

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

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

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

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

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

Down with realpolitik, for a revolutionary tenderness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fall of Empire

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

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

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

What we mean by The West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empire will outlive the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stopping this world

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

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

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

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

Revolution?

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

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

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

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

Sooner or later, it will fall

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

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

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

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

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

Rupture by insistence

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

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

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

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

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

The organizational dilemma

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

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

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

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

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

Choose boldness, measure risk

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

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

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

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

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

Defending the revolution

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

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

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

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

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

The evidence of popular power

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Starting over

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

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

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

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

I. Creating a transnational space for liaison

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

II. Pooling and multiplying our resources

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

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

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

III. Mapping a planet of friendly places

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

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

IV. Producing a transnational revolutionary culture

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

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

Between the improbable and the possible

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

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

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

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

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

___

Notes:

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

ii Every Single One Means Every Single One

iii Out with Them All

iv Out of Here

v Women, Life, Freedom

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

Void Network (Athens– Greece)
presents
GEN Z MAKES HISTORY / TOUR 2026

SAT. 30 MAY 2026 – STARTS AT 19.00
free entrance / donations

A book presentation
TALKS and public dialogue
about global social revolts in our decade:

Tasos Sagris & Sissy Doutsiou (Void Network– Greece )
Members of Plan C (UK)
CrimethInc. (USA– online)
George Katsiafikas – activist/sociologist, editor of the book Gen Z Makes History (Indonesia- online)

COWLEY CLUB
12 London Rd, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN1 4JA

+18 members and guests only

This event will take place both physically and online. Audience from anywhere in the world may attend via Zoom.

GLOBAL online access LINK here:

https://tinyurl.com/VoidCrimePlan

Organized by
www.voidnetwork.gr

eroseffect.com | crimethinc.com | www.weareplanc.org

FREE Download the book “Gen Z Makes History” HERE

After four months in Asia, Void Network continues the tour in Brighton to share experiences and understandings and encourage people to sustain Gen Z’s heroism. Whether Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Z, we should follow the lead taken by recent uprisings. All human beings are increasingly power-less within nation-states armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction. Global warming advances daily. As Gen Z has so remarkably illustrated, our most effective action is militant street protests.

Just when we thought that the world was going completely to hell, Gen Z uprisings swept country after country, demanding life over death. Whether the issue was elite corruption in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Philippines, police brutality in Indonesia, Israeli genocide in Gaza, increased taxes in Kenya, mandatory pension plans in Peru, scandalously underfunded hospitals in Morocco, or a lack of basic services like electricity and water in Madagascar, a new generation has emerged in the struggle for better lives.

The post Gen Z Makes History – Tour 2026 Brighton Cowley Club SAT 30/5 appeared first on Void Network.

April 9 2026 – Cainta, Rizal (We Are Loving Anarchist-WALA)

April 11 – Taguig City (We Still Exist Collective)

April 12 – Muntinlupa City (Onsite Community)

April 18 – Cubao Quezon City (Non Collective Flying House)

April 22-24 – Baler Aurora (Squat Fest)

April 26 – Morong, Rizal (Canna-Community Library event)

more dates and areas to be announced soon HERE

FREE Download the book “Gen Z Makes History” HERE

We tour to encourage people to sustain Gen Z’s heroism. Whether Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Z, we should follow the lead taken by recent uprisings. All human beings are increasingly power-less within nation-states armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction. Global warming advances daily. As Gen Z has so remarkably illustrated, our most effective action is militant street protests.

Just when we thought that the world was going completely to hell, Gen Z uprisings swept country after country, demanding life over death. Whether the issue was elite corruption in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Philippines, police brutality in Indonesia, Israeli genocide in Gaza, increased taxes in Kenya, mandatory pension plans in Peru, scandalously underfunded hospitals in Morocco, or a lack of basic services like electricity and water in Madagascar, a new generation has emerged in the struggle for better lives.

www.voidnetwork.gr | eroseffect.com | crimethinc.com

The post Gen Z Makes History Tour- Philippines Archipelago 2026 appeared first on Void Network.

Regarding the uprising in Iran, another schism is becoming apparent within the movements in the West. A schism that escalates into verbal confrontation within an extremely feverish, oppressive, and competitive environment.

Written by Thanasis Kosmopoulos / RisingUtopia– Athens Greece

Translated by Tasos Sagris / Void Network

If at least those of us who express opinions from the ramparts of the movement could manage to free our thinking from the feverish compression of these times and from the competitive-narcissistic culture that has permeated us—perhaps without our even realizing it—we could produce results through fruitful disagreements.

The schism lies in how we view the situation. Some prioritize the significance of the uprising in Iran as an expression of liberation from theocratic power, with poverty and oppression as the main causes, while those “on the other side” prioritize the geopolitical dimension, interpreting the uprising as instigated by American-Zionist imperialism in order to undermine the theocratic regime and restore the Pahlavi dictatorship.

The fact that each side focuses only on one extreme (the uprising from below), while the other focuses on something entirely different (the uprising as planned subversion), taking positions at the most extreme poles, shows how much competitive logic and self-promotion through disagreement has infiltrated the movements—even among people who are organized and know how to discuss things when they meet in person. So like imprisoned mice, we tear each other apart, each one entrenched in their own narcissism.

Setting aside, however, the “psychodynamic” fields of the outlet where this text is being written, we must take a position on the events in Iran at this time. And the position states that a mass social uprising is a reality where things are suddenly disrupted, and for the umpteenth time, in the relationship between society and power. This mass-scale uprising with hundreds of dead and wounded cannot be happening out of nowhere through manipulation by an external actor. The Americans are experts at dictatorships, at abductions, and at coup practices for changing regimes that didn’t suit them, even in mini-uprisings like Maidan, which was nothing more than the surface pretext for state overthrows that had already been prepared on the Ukrainian political stage long before.

Here it’s not the same as Ukraine. No foreign power can “stage” a mass social uprising in Iran with this altar of blood. Much less transform it so that a society of 92 million consents to the change from 47 years of theocratic power to the dictatorship of any Pahlavis. In Iran today, anti-American sentiments are far more prevalent than anti-regime ones. The US knows that even with a more easily successful military coup, Iranians would hardly accept American hegemony. The possibility of failure of an instigated practice is very serious.

There is a burden that moves Iranian society to risk their lives in the streets of Iranian cities. And as always, one of the main causes and triggers of major uprisings is the sudden decrease in income and the absence of freedom. Then no one can downgrade a mass social uprising because it is spontaneous. It is not instigated.

Some commentators, highlighting the consequences of the chronic embargo on the difficult position of the poor strata, again attribute responsibility for the social uprising to the West and its sanctions, as indirect “manipulation” toward uprising. Yes, this argument also has a basis, but the embargo doesn’t mean that the state doesn’t have the ability to find a way to fix this problem. After all, Iran has very close relations with China, participating in the Shanghai alliance.

So here there is an issue: from which perspective do we see things, and from which perspective are things actually happening.

Anyone who wants to maintain an anarchist/libertarian political identity must analyze an uprising from the perspective of the insurgents.

Freedom, the human being, the community, society—these are priorities, values, ethics, a way of seeing things. Even if geopolitics weighs more heavily on events as in Ukraine, we as libertarian anarchists must see the sufferings of societies affected by this war FIRST! The possibility of intervention by the social actor FIRST! This is the imperative of our worldview. This is what made us be with the Palestinians FIRST! We are with the Palestinians and not with their flags. This is what makes us be with the insurgent Iranians FIRST! And not with the flags of the state they are subjects of. This is our perspective. The ethics of our values above whatever geopolitical correlations.

Conversely, in the case where we view this uprising from a geopolitical perspective, it is inevitable that this downgrades the insurgents, perceives them as manipulated pawns, insults people who are giving even their blood in the struggle against the state’s forces of repression. With this logic, no uprising can fail to be instigated, since all uprisings occur under active geopolitical conditions. And the social uprising for the police asssination of 15 years old student Alexis Grigoropoulos in Greece 2008 was considered by some to be instigated by Russia while by others by Turkey. I don’t think this is the way that corresponds to the perspective of all of us who are participants in the cause of social Anarchism. I believe that by focusing on geopolitics, we have internalized a managerial conception of movements that belongs to the dominant logics of “mass management,” as well as to the detached games of the geopolitical chessboard of power relations.

Explaining the stance of many comrades on social media, I believe that during the previous period with the genocide in Gaza, some of us, beyond the historical dimension of the Nakba, belatedly discovered the geopolitical dimension of things. The tragedy of the genocide not only brought American-Zionist aggression into the frame of our political critique but also quite rightly targeted it as an axis of evil—a now established conception that is confirmed by “the Trump reality” every day.

Consequently, Gaza opened a new chapter in our political understanding, a dimension that the older ones among us had taken into account anyway, but which the younger ones didn’t have, since the social movements barely dealt with geopolitics. This new ‘discovery’ was received as a revelation, when in reality not only is this far from true, but the opposite may occur: this newly acquired analytical tool we’re so eager to showcase can actually blind us even more through our over-idealization of it. This happens because many of us treat what we previously ignored as a ‘revelation,’ when it’s actually something very old and quite leftist in origin. Because an analysis that puts societies on the margins, devaluing them as absolutely controlled and manipulated, that if it doesn’t identify them with states considers them levers of geopolitical interests, is nothing but a leftist analysis derived from the spirit of Stalinism, and later during the Cold War era.

Let’s stop “reinventing the wheel” by idealizing “our new tool” because of our previous ignorance. This way of perceiving things is wrong. Let’s do some introspection to see all those “patterns” that function permanently in our understanding, and let’s rid ourselves of them, if we want to become dangerous to the State. It’s a problem when geopolitics takes precedence over the societies. The superpowers, the regional powers, the states and their moves quite logically come to the center of our perspective through the deeper desire to see the genocidal punished, with the consequence, however, that we downgrade the subject that interests us, namely that of emancipatory uprising or the corresponding social revolution.

I would say then, recognizing that in the historical time of an uprising, the geopolitical dimension also takes place—it’s quite unlikely that Mossad units are not in the field—we must focus on what is primary, which is nothing other than solidarity with a society that is rising up for a better life and for its freedom. This in itself has value. This is axiologically our libertarian way of seeing reality, without ignoring the economic, geopolitical, religious, cultural, or historical dimension of issues. Giving honor and respect to the culture of the people of the East, divesting from our critical stance any colonial Western privileges.

In conclusion, being primarily interested in the stakes of “moving” societies does not preclude taking a position on geopolitical stakes but also on every other dimension of issues. First and foremost, we are interested in the people who are rising up and the success of their struggle for a better life; secondarily, we are interested in geopolitical conflicts, which we judge primarily based on what’s good for societies, which in reality creates that anti-colonial, anti-imperialist value code.

Yes, today American-Zionism is the matrix and source of state terrorism, neo-fascism, and wars. It is a source of oppression and misery and subjugation of many societies around the world. We will not divest ourselves of our value code by supporting its opponents and raising flags of oppressive regimes on our otherwise anarchist social media profile. Our stance cannot be determined by geopolitical dynamics, nor by the hatred we have for opponents. The opponent of my opponent cannot be my friend.

Our value system has at its center social revolution for freedom, common ownership, equality, horizontality. That is, social emancipation, which like a polar star forms an axial direction in a straight line. Imperialism, colonialism, nation-states are forms of oppression and exploitation. They can even coexist. We too can stand against them, being critical without betraying our principles.

In this way we must meet with the struggles of Iranians as well as all those who rise up against the state/capital system.

___

Written by Thanasis Kosmopoulos / RisingUtopia– Athens Greece

The post On the Uprising in Iran and the Schism Within the Movements in the West appeared first on Void Network.

Not possessing prophetic visions, it will be difficult to predict what forms Anarchism will take in the 21st century, as this depends on the geographical, cultural, political, social, and temporal context. Undoubtedly, struggles for the expansion of spaces of freedom, equality in differences, and solidarity—individual and collective—(including and especially among strangers) will always constitute the axes around which the specifically appropriate forms and modes of conflict will revolve, depending on the context of anarchism, or rather anarchisms.

I will briefly focus on three global scenarios, not alternatives, but rather intersecting yet not hierarchically descending, within which twenty-first-century anarchists will strive to identify the best forms of action. There is clearly a fourth, linked to gender issues, but other contributions will provide us with general and specific features and contextual objectives of struggle. Of course, these scenarios do not exclude or downplay the more common, more everyday, and perhaps more local spheres of struggle, whose importance is crucial to our rooting in the territories where we live. However, in my opinion, global scenarios will also “over-determine” local or traditional conflicts, changing their forms and modalities and imparting, in my view, significant twists.

The first is climate change, which alters the planet’s living conditions, jeopardising the survival of its ecosystems, with the risk of demographic conflicts, migratory movements, and the violent exploitation of resources (fertile land, water), etc. The nomadism typical (and even original) of the human species cannot be stopped by state or “natural” borders, such will be the pressure of migration in search of better living conditions. If the pace of exploitation of humanity’s resources (land and water, first and foremost) is not reversed, increasingly bloody conflicts will erupt, considering that half the world’s population is of working age, and a quarter of them live in rural areas, where 80% of global poverty exists. This is without considering the informal, obscure, and invisible work that escapes ILO or World Bank statistics. In these conditions, which it would be unworthy to call “emergency”—so endemic and reiterated are they by the dynamics of power and inequality on a global scale—the approach to problems can only hinge on bottom-up self-organisation, to mitigate the destructive effects of current climate policies pursued by unscrupulous state and business elites. It is from this practice of solidarity and self-organisation that an anarchist ethos is forged: a training ground for creativity in horizontal problem-solving that will gradually extend to the complete reorganisation of social life according to libertarian practices and attitudes. It is therefore time for the livability of and on our planet to enter the political agenda of social anarchism with determination, since we cannot count on being among the elite who will migrate to the Moon or Mars following Elon Musk & Co.

The second global scenario is the recourse to war as a challenge to global hegemony in the 21st century, with the risks of nuclear annihilation and mass extermination. Already at the close of the last millennium, many American scholars were questioning which would be the hegemonic power in the second half of the 21st century, seeing China and its allies (including Russia) as the most likely competitor against which to pursue policies of containment and aggressive counterbalancing. It’s not difficult to imagine the same in China, only that analyses and studies are not easily accessible, let alone legible. After all, history has never seen smooth and peaceful successions of global hegemony—quite the opposite. It is no coincidence, then, and not just today, that we are witnessing a growing militarisation of societies, which already directly results in the disintegration of hard-won “rights,” even without losing the pretence of (pseudo)democratic representation, with the reduction of constitutional states to electoral-parliamentary autocracies. Freedom of action, speech, expression, the ability to shape one’s life as one sees fit, and the ability to adopt non-conformist customs and traditions are all practices wrested with difficulty from previous generations and, in some cases, from the living. Whether they are constitutionalised or translated into legal norms is of little importance: positive law grants and takes away based on more or less strengthened parliamentary majorities. The path will make the difference.

By militarisation, we must not and cannot merely evoke the visible presence of signs of armed power (army, police forces, armaments, war industries, etc.). We must address the internalisation of a warmongering and bellicose culture, which arms consciences from a very young age, pressuring them with violent models for solving everyday problems and overcoming the obstacles that life throws at us at every step. Cultural models in which violence is exalted because it is simulated—game over, and we begin again—life as a video game in which you kill and are killed, but then you rise again in a limitless and infinite fight. It is no coincidence that entertainment video games fuel and are in turn fueled by military simulations, by autonomous and automatic weaponry that transform war in its forms, anaesthetising its wounds and physical traumas and transferring them to a psychic sphere. This is at least for those who attack from a position of technological supremacy, not for those who suffer its effects, as every victim of war knows.

We must not underestimate or minimise the hybrid militarisation that insinuates itself from cyberspace into our pockets via digital devices. These devices are not only the source of capitalist surveillance for commercial marketing purposes, but also, and above all, the control exerted by governments and private companies, which now possess an infinite amount of knowledge related to our tastes, our actions, our physical and virtual experiences, which are transformed into numerical data easily processed by algorithms, resulting in a unique mass profiling —and this may not sound contradictory—that is useful for predicting and even guiding our future behaviour.

Which brings us to the third global scenario: the advent of digital technologies, and AI specifically, which is literally revolutionising the way of life in our societies, not only in the areas of living labour, which can be replaced by robots and various machines, nor only in the ways in which “political” opinions are channelled during elections. The split between the corporeal, “real” sphere and the “virtual” dimension, whose effects are just as real, intertwine, delineating the formation of a subjectivity very different from the one we have become accustomed to on the material terrain of social classes and the balance of power. In an era of extreme individualism, advocated and encouraged by the neoliberal policies of recent decades, the collective sphere has shattered to be “resurrected” in the relationship between the self and the screen of my digital device; Physical sociality has in some ways evaporated in favour of a virtual “sociality,” managed by proprietary platforms, within which a fiction of communication and dialogue is enacted with just as many other selves, each connected via their own screen. The fiction of having a following of followers, of having tons of friends: in effect, we are unknowingly immersed in a bubble, within which my opinions resonate, becoming convictions as soon as I see them confirmed by others who think exactly like me. The end of the pluralism of ideas, excluded from echo chambers, the end of the emergence of dissent, the end of dialectical confrontation between different people. And when these virtual expulsions resurface in the space-time of corporeal existence, being unaccustomed of relating to different others turns into gratuitous, senseless, unexpected violence, except as a “defensive” form of a psychology devoid of real sociality, precisely because it is imbued with “social” surrogates.

Neoliberal individualism, further translocated into the digital universe, produces conformist individuals, diversified replicas of a machine matrix whose limits and technological advances we have likely become prostheses, experimentally testing. We think we are the ones using the devices, but perhaps it’s precisely the opposite. Outside of any community of reference, disoriented and tossed from one platform to another, what kind of subjectivity will ultimately consolidate? What community could give rise to the communism of goods and services? What critical and diverse subject could emerge in the increasingly pressing relationship between the human and the machine?

The new ways in which we feel we are subjects of ourselves, aware and critical of reality, push us to deepen and diversify our analytical tools, to seize new opportunities for “social(i)” connections from which we can reconstitute a strong destituent community capable of imagining and therefore experimenting with collective utopias organized around the pivot of the absence of power.

Written by Salvo Vaccaro for Umanità Nova (Italy)

Machine Translation in English- edited by Blade Runner. 

Summary of a presentation at the Carrara Conference (11-12 October 2025) on occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Italian Anarchist Federation.

SOURCE: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/12/17/21st-century-anarchism/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

Written by Blade Runner

On Saturday 13 September, more than 110,000 people turned out in central London, travelling from across the UK, in a mobilisation framed as a defence of “free speech” but saturated with white nationalist, Islamophobic, and anti-migrant rhetoric. It is said to have been the largest far-right protest in history.

The social media influencer who called the mobilisation, Tommy Robinson, was joined by international supporters: Elon Musk appeared by video link, calling for the government to be removed and parliament dissolved, while Éric Zemmour, the French far-right politician, invoked the “great replacement” myth in openly Islamophobic terms.

Saturday’s counter-protest drew up to 20,000 people, organised by local trade unions and grassroots groups. After a rally, they marched and ended up behind the far-right stage, where they were surrounded and effectively kettled for hours, with hostile crowds pressing against police lines. A small black bloc was at one point trapped behind far-right lines before withdrawing to the left bloc. Beer bottles and other projectiles were thrown at both police and anti-fascists.

The sheer scale of the crowds overwhelmed the under-resourced police force, which had otherwise been fully prepared to arrest hundreds of supporters of the proscribed Palestine Action. By the end of the day, the Met reported 26 officers injured—four seriously—and at least 25 arrests for assault and violent disorder, mostly of far-right attendees attempting to break through cordons. Anti-fascist blocs were eventually escorted out through narrow corridors in the middle of hostile crowds.

This mobilisation followed a summer of racist outrage, coordinated online, amplified particularly by Labour politicians, and legitimised by media coverage. Already in June, London had hosted a mass rally under the “Football Lads Against Grooming Gangs / For Our Children” banner—another openly racist march where a small anti-fascist bloc was kettled “for its own protection.”

Unlike previous eruptions in Britain, today’s racist outrage is consistently organised. Protests are rapidly mobilised, digitally coordinated, openly backed by political forces and legitimised by mainstream media, who push the myth of a “migrant invasion threatening a decaying country.”

This is part of a broader domestic and international counterinsurgency embedding the far right within Western societies. Fascists present themselves as defenders of working-class communities, co-opting the language and aesthetics of protest, all in service of white supremacy. Clashes with police are disciplinary theatre—reinforcing state power, not challenging it.

Anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left often appear disconnected from local communities, with little presence in the neighbourhoods or direct connections to refugees. We arrive as outsiders, sometimes facing kettling, harassment, and arrests.

Mainstream accounts frame the far-right surge as a backlash to left failures—neoliberal betrayal, cultural elitism, identity politics “gone too far.” But this obscures the deeper truth: Western societies long ago abandoned ideological politics, and whatever radicalism remained was absorbed and neutralised by social-democratic parties acting as pressure valves. Today’s political irrelevance is the result of decades of co-option and betrayal.

The gap between consumerist comfort zones and excluded populations has become an unbridgeable chasm. Digital natives grow up immersed in a technologically curated reality. Inside the citadel of the wealthy Global North, most can meet their basic material needs, while outside survival itself is precarious. Yet on both sides of the wall, the capacity to imagine life beyond the dominant narrative is vanishing.

The new middle classes function as highly specialised technicians and computer operators in a fully automated dystopia that extracts and destroys at unprecedented levels. Those who fail to adapt are rendered expendable. Genocide and ecocide advance hand in hand—perhaps the bleakest picture humanity has painted in civilisation’s history. Both the left and the right struggle to confront this reality in its full scale.

Governments steer reactionary domestic fronts—claiming to counter far-right drift while pushing anti-migrant policies. Repression is intense, with AI-driven surveillance defining a new society of control and feeding into a global shift toward a de facto wartime economy driven by the military–industrial complex. Militarised, racialised social orders prepare for war abroad and repression at home.

The far-right resurgence in the UK mirrors trends across Europe and the US. It is fuelled by wealthy donors and business interests, unfolding amid post-colonial restructuring. Nationalist militarism is global capitalism’s go-to strategy for managing its own contradictions, demanding a compliant, racist, and surveilled population in exchange for hollow “security” and “sovereignty.” War restructures society through displacement and discipline, always along racial lines.

New migration waves toward the citadels will continue, driven by deepening inequality, war, and ecological collapse. Migrants will remain scapegoats for crises they did not cause.

In the Middle East, this scapegoating turns genocidal. Palestinians—once a key source of precarious labour in Israel—have been rendered surplus. Racism so dehumanising it treats them as disease-carriers underpins the ongoing offensive: erasure of an indigenous population to consolidate a Greater Israel aligned with US interests and settler-colonial permanence.

The same logic that obliterates Gaza demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white nationalism. Racism and xenophobia justify both foreign aggression and domestic repression. Liberalism cloaks this in the language of rights—but its function remains control. The UK’s Public Order Act 2023 claims to preserve safety and democracy while criminalising protest and expanding police powers, wrapping repression in procedural fairness.

The left, meanwhile, clings to illuminated vanguardism and backs authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West. Reviving the ideological zombies of Marxist orthodoxy and party-line praxis will not get us out of this nightmare. The revolts of this century were announced as joyful majority movements grounded in the lives and resistance of the displaced, exploited, and exiled. Building trust in our communities means abandoning the ideological habits that isolate us and reduce us to joyless, miserable lifestyle cults.

Palestine, climate, migration—these are not separate struggles. Internationalist solidarity must stretch across all fronts. Our enemies are not only abstract “isms” or tanks and cops, but also patriarchy, borders, data centres, and propaganda systems—left and right—that sustain the global war economy.

As global restructuring accelerates, the left–right binary fades. Direct action beyond ideology and party politics gains traction among a new generation. We must revive revolutionary imagination and resist the cynical pessimism of rigid orthodoxy.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel—but we do need to joyfully rise to the occasion. Grassroots counter-information and deep community engagement remain as relevant as ever.

And we must have honest conversations with our leftist friends and allies: there hasn’t been a single uprising in history that left leaders didn’t betray. Disappointment will follow hollow promises for a “better” party.

The spectre of revolt from the past decades still haunts the elites and this reactionary wave is their effort to stop it from taking form again. Our task is to crush the snake eggs before they hatch—to build bonds of trust, create spaces of refusal, and confront not just fascism but the system that breeds it. What it fears most is our capacity to live ungovernable.

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I think it is useful to set up as a framework for discussion four somewhat idealized positions with regard to the role of the state in an advanced industrial society. I want to call these positions: (1) classical liberal, (2) libertarian socialist, (3) state socialist, (4) state capitalist, and I want to consider each in turn. Also, I’d like to make clear my own point of view in advance, so that you can evaluate and judge what I am saying. I think that the libertarian socialist concepts, and by that I mean a range of thinking that extends from left-wing Marxism through to anarchism, I think that these are fundamentally correct and that they are the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society.

In contrast, it seems to me that the ideology of state socialism, i.e. what has become of Bolshevism, and that of state capitalism, the modern welfare state, these of course are dominant in the industrial societies, but I believe that they are regressive and highly inadequate social theories, and a large number of our really fundamental problems stem from a kind of incompatibility and inappropriateness of these social forms to a modern industrial society.

Let me consider these four points of reference in sequence, beginning with the classical liberal point of view.

Classical Liberalism

Classical liberalism asserts as its major idea an opposition to all but the most restricted and minimal forms of state intervention in personal and social life. Well, this conclusion is quite familiar, however the reasoning that leads to it is less familiar and, I think, a good deal more important than the conclusion itself.

One of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position is in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Limits of State Action” which was written in 1792, though not published for 60 or 70 years after that. In his view the state tends to, I quote, “make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes, and since man is in his essence a free, searching, self-perfecting being, it follows that the state is a profoundly anti-human institution.” I.e. its actions, its existence are ultimately incompatible with the full harmonious development of human potential in its richest diversity and, hence, incompatible with what Humboldt and in the following century Marx, Bakunin, Mill, and many others, what they see as the true end of man.

And, for the record, I think that this is an accurate description. The modern conservative tends to regard himself as the lineal descendant of the classical liberal in this sense, but I think that can be maintained only from an extremely superficial point of view, as one can see by studying more carefully the fundamental ideas of classical libertarian thought as expressed, in my opinion, in its most profound form by Humboldt.

I think the issues are of really quite considerable contemporary significance, and if you don’t mind what may appear to be a somewhat antiquarian excursion, I’d like to expand on them.

For Humboldt as for Rousseau, and before him the Cartesians, man’s central attribute is his freedom. Quote: “To inquire and to create, these are the centers around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve.” “But,” he goes on to say, “all moral cultures spring solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul and can never be produced by external and artificial contrivances. The cultivation of the understanding, as of any of man’s other faculties, is generally achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the discoveries of others.”

From these assumptions quite obviously an educational theory follows, and he develops it but I won’t pursue it. But also far more follows. Humboldt goes on to develop at least the rudiments of a theory of exploitation and of alienated labor that suggests in significant ways, I think, the early Marx. Humboldt in fact continues these comments that I quoted about the cultivation of the understanding through spontaneous action in the following way.

He says, “Man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does, and the laborer who tends the garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits. And since truly human action is that which flows from inner impulse, it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists, that is men who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and invented skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character and exult and refine their pleasures, and so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often tend to be degraded. Freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being but remains alien to his true nature. He does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness. And if a man acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction, rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”

For Humboldt then man “is born to inquire and create, and when a man or a child chooses to inquire or create out of his own free choice then he becomes in his own terms an artist rather than a tool of production or a well trained parrot.” This is the essence of his concept of human nature. And I think that it is very revealing and interesting to compare it with Marx, with the early Marx manuscripts, and in particular his account of, quote “the alienation of labor when work is external to the worker, not part of his nature, so that he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself and is physically exhausted and mentally debased. This alienated labor that casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines, thus depriving man of his species character, of free conscious activity and productive life.”

Recall also Marx’s well known and often quoted reference to a higher form of society in which labor has become not only a means of life but also the highest want in life. And recall also his repeated criticism of the specialized labor which, I quote again, “mutilates the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrades him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, makes his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed, estranges him from the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power.”

Robert Tucker, for one, has rightly emphasized that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a frustrated producer than as a dissatisfied consumer. And this far more radical critique of capitalist relations of production flows directly, often in the same words, from the libertarian thought of the enlightenment. For this reason, I think, one must say that classical liberal ideas in their essence, though not in the way they developed, are profoundly anti-capitalist. The essence of these ideas must be destroyed for them to serve as an ideology of modern industrial capitalism.

Writing in the 1780’s and early 1790’s, Humboldt had no conception of the forms that industrial capitalism would take. Consequently, in this classic of classical liberalism he stresses the problem of limiting state power, and he is not overly concerned with the dangers of private power. The reason is that he believes in and speaks of the essential equality of condition of private citizens. Of course, he has no idea, writing in 1790, of the ways in which the notion of a private person would come to be reinterpreted in the era of corporate capitalism.

He did not foresee, I now quote the anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker, “that democracy with its model of equality of all citizens before the law and liberalism with its right of man over his own person both would be wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. Humboldt did not foresee that in a predatory capitalist economy state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence, to prevent the destruction of the physical environment. I speak optimistically of course.”

As Karl Polanyi, for one, has pointed out: “The self-adjusting market could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. It would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.” I think that is correct. Humboldt also did not foresee the consequences of the commodity character of labor. The doctrine is, again in Polanyi’s words, “that it is not for the commodity to decide where it should be offered for sale, to what purpose it should be used, at what price it should be allowed to change hands, in what manner it should be consumed or destroyed.” But the commodity in this case is of course human life. And social protection was therefore a minimal necessity to constrain the irrational and destructive workings of the classical free market.
Nor did Humboldt understand in 1790 that capitalist economic relations perpetuated a form of bondage which long before that, in fact as early as 1767, Simon Linguet had declared to be even worse than slavery, writing “it is the impossibility of earning a living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? He is free, you say, that is his misfortune. These men, it is said, have no master. They have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters: that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.”

And if there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage – as every spokesman for the enlightenment would insist -, then it would follow that a new emancipation must be awaited, what Fourier referred to as the third and last emancipatory phase of history, the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second wage earners out of serfs, and the third, which will transform the proletariats to free men, by eliminating the commodity character of labor, ending wage slavery and bringing the commercial, industrial and financial institutions under democratic control.

These are all things that Humboldt in his classical liberal doctrine did not express and didn’t see, but I think that he might have accepted these conclusions. He does, for example, agree that state intervention in social life is legitimate “if freedom would destroy the very conditions without which not only freedom but even existence itself would be inconceivable”, which are precisely the circumstances that arise in an unconstrained capitalist economy. And he does, as in the remarks that I quoted, vigorously condemn the alienation of labor.

In any event, his criticism of bureaucracy and the autocratic state stands as a very eloquent forewarning of some of the most dismal aspects of modern history, and the important point is that the basis of his critique is applicable to a far broader range of coercive institutions than he imagined, in particular to the institutions of industrial capitalism.

Though he expresses a classical liberal doctrine, Humboldt is no primitive individualist, in the style of for example Rousseau. Rousseau extols the savage who lives within himself but Humboldt’s vision is entirely different. He sums up his remarks as follows: “The whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be reduced to this ‘that while they would break all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible, the isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered.’” And he, in fact, looks forward to a community of free association, without coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions, in which free men can create and inquire and achieve the highest development of their powers.

In fact, far ahead of his time, he presents an anarchist vision that is appropriate perhaps to the next stage of industrial society. We can perhaps look forward to a day when these various strands will be brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social form that barely exists today, though its elements can perhaps be perceived. For example, in the guarantee of individual rights that has achieved so far its fullest realization, though still tragically flawed, in the western democracies or in the Israeli kibbutzim or in the experiments of workers’ councils in Yugoslavia or in the effort to awaken popular consciousness and to create a new involvement in the social process which is a fundamental element in the third world revolutions coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian practice.

Let me summarize the first point. The first concept of the state that I want to set up as a reference is classical liberal. Its doctrine is that the state functions should be drastically limited. But this familiar characterization is a very superficial one. More deeply, the classical liberal view develops from a certain concept of human nature, one that stresses the importance of diversity and free creation. Therefore, this view is in fundamental opposition to industrial capitalism with its wage slavery, its alienated labor and its hierarchic and authoritarian principles of social and economic organization.
At least in its ideal form, classical liberal thought is opposed as well to the concepts of possessive individualism that are intrinsic to capitalist ideology. It seeks to eliminate social fetters and to replace them by social bonds, not by competitive greed, not by predatory individualism, not of course by corporate empires, state or private. Classical libertarian thought seems to me, therefore, to lead directly to libertarian socialism or anarchism, if you like, when combined with an understanding of industrial capitalism.

Libertarian Socialism and Anarchism

The second point of reference that I want to discuss is the libertarian socialist vision of the state. A French writer, rather sympathetic to anarchism, once wrote that “anarchism has a broad back – like paper it endures anything.” And there are many shades of anarchism. I am concerned here only with one, namely the anarchism of Bakunin who wrote in his anarchist manifesto of 1865 that to be an anarchist one must first be a socialist. I am concerned with the anarchism of Adolf Fisher, one of the martyrs of the Hay Market affair in 1886, who said that every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist. A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production. Such property is indeed, as Proudhon in his famous remark asserted, a form of theft. But a consistent anarchist will also oppose the organization of production by government.

Quoting “it means state socialism, the command of the state officials over production and the command of managers, scientists, shop officials in the shop. The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation, and this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves, being master over production, by some form of workers’ councils.” These remarks, it happens, are quoted from the left wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, and in fact radical Marxism – what Lenin once called infantile ultra-leftism – merges with anarchist currents. This is an important point, I think, and let me give one further illustration of this convergence between left wing Marxism and socialist anarchism.

Consider the following characterization of revolutionary socialism: “The revolutionary socialist denies that state ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the state cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees. Socialism will fundamentally be an industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial character. Thus those carrying on the social activity and industries of society will be directly represented in the local and central councils of social administration. In this way the powers of such delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and conversant with the needs of the community. When the central industrial administrative committee meets it will represent every phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical state will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee of socialism. The transition from one social system to the other will be the social revolution. The political state throughout history has meant the government of men by ruling classes; the republic of socialism will be the government of industry administered on behalf of the whole community. The former meant the economic and political subjection of the many, the latter will mean the economic freedom of all. It will be, therefore, a true democracy.”

These remarks are taken from a book called “The State: Its Origins and Function”, written by William Paul in early 1917, just prior to Lenin’s “State and Revolution”, which is his most libertarian work.

William Paul was one of the founders of the British Communist Party, later the editor of the British Communist Party Journal. And it is interesting that his critique of state socialism resembles very closely, I think, the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists, in particular, in its principle that the state must disappear, to be replaced by the industrial organization of society in the course of the social revolution itself. Proudhon in 1851 wrote that what we put in place of the government is industrial organization, and many similar comments can be cited. That, in essence, is the fundamental idea of anarchist revolutionaries. What’s more important than the fact that many such statements can be cited is that these ideas have been realized in spontaneous revolutionary action several times. For example, in Germany and Italy after the first World War, in Catalonia in 1936.

One might argue, or at least I would argue, that council communism in this sense, in the sense of the long quotation that I read is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, technocrats, a vanguard party, a state bureaucracy, or whatever. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination, the classical liberal ideals which are expressed also by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized.

Man will, in other words, not be free to inquire and create, to develop his own potentialities to their fullest. The worker will remain a fragment of a human being, degraded, a tool in the productive process directed from above. And the ideas of revolutionary libertarian socialism, in this sense, have been submerged in the industrial societies of the past half century. The dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism and state capitalism.

But there has been an interesting resurgence in the last couple of years. In fact, the theses that I quoted from Anton Pannekoek were taken from a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers group, and the quotation that I read from William Paul on revolutionary socialism was taken from a paper by Walter Kendall at the National Conference on Workers Control in Sheffield, England, last March.

Both of these groups represent something significant. The Workers Control Movement in England, in particular, has developed into, I think, a remarkably significant force in the last few years. It includes some of the largest trade unions, for example the Amalgamated Engineering Federation which, I think, is the second largest trade union in England and which has taken these principles as its fundamental ideas. It’s had a series of successful conferences, putting out an interesting pamphlet literature, and on the continent there are parallel developments. May 1968 in France of course accelerated the growing interest in council communism and similar ideas and other forms of libertarian socialism in France and Germany, as it did in England.

Given the general conservative cast of our highly ideological society, it’s not too surprising that the United States is relatively untouched by these currents. But that too may change. The erosion of the Cold War mythology at least makes it possible to discuss some of these questions, and if the present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build on the achievements of the past decade, the problem of how to organize industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic control in the workplace as well as in the community, this should become the dominant intellectual issue for those who are alive to the problems of contemporary society. And as a mass movement for revolutionary libertarian socialism develops, as I hope it will, speculation should proceed to action.

It may seem quixotic to group left Marxism and anarchism under the same rubric, as I have done, given the antagonism throughout the past century between the Marxists and the anarchists, beginning with the antagonism between Marx and Engels on the one hand and, for example, Proudhon and Bakunin on the other. In the nineteenth century at least, their differences with regard to the question of the state was significant, but in a sense it was tactical. The anarchists were convinced that capitalism and the state must be destroyed together. But Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed his opposition to this idea as follows: “The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly conquered power, hold down its adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers, similar to those after the Paris commune.”

Now, the Paris Commune, I think it is fair to say, did represent the ideas of libertarian socialism, of anarchism if you like, and Marx wrote about it with great enthusiasm. In fact, the experience of the commune led him to modify his concept of the role of the state and to take on something more of an anarchist perspective of the nature of social revolution, as you can see, for example, by looking at the introduction to the Communist Manifesto, the edition that was published in 1872. The commune was of course drowned in blood, as the anarchist communes of Spain were destroyed by Fascist and Communist armies. And it might be argued that more dictatorial structures would have defended the revolution against such forces. But I doubt this very much, at least in the case of Spain, it seems to me that a more consistent libertarian policy might have provided the only possible defense of the revolution.

Of course this can be contested and this is a long story that I don’t want to go into here, but at the very least it is clear that one would have to be rather naive, after the events of the past half century, to fail to see the truth in Bakunin’s repeated warnings that the red bureaucracy would prove to be the most violent and terrible lie of the century. “Take the most radical revolutionary and place him on the throne of all Russia”, he said in 1870, “or give him dictatorial power, and before a year has passed he will become worse than the Czar himself.”

I’m afraid, in this respect Bakunin was all too perceptive, and this kind of warning was repeatedly voiced from the left. For example, in the 1890’s the anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier asked, “Must the transitional state to be endured necessarily or inevitably be the collectivist jail? Might it not consist of a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?”

I don’t pretend to know the answer to that question, but I think that it is tolerably clear that unless the answer is positive, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are perhaps rather slight. I think Martin Buber put the problem quite succinctly when he said: “One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.” For just this reason, it is essential that a powerful revolutionary movement exist in the United States, if there are to be any reasonable possibilities for democratic social change of a radical sort anywhere in the capitalist world. And comparable remarks, I think, undoubtedly hold for the Russian empire.

Lenin until the end of his life stressed the idea that “it is an elementary truth of Marxism that the victory of socialism requires the joint effort of workers in a number of advanced countries. At the very least it requires that the great centers of world imperialism be impeded by domestic pressures from counter revolutionary intervention. Only such possibilities will permit any revolution to overthrow its own coercive state institutions as it tries to bring the economy under direct democratic control.

Let me summarize briefly again. I have mentioned so far two reference points for discussion of the state, classical liberalism and libertarian socialism. They are in agreement that the functions of the state are repressive and that state action must be limited. The libertarian socialist goes on to insist that the state power must be eliminated in favor of the democratic organization of the industrial society with direct popular control over all institutions by those who participate in as well as those who are directly affected by the workings of these institutions. So one might imagine a system of workers’ councils, consumer councils, commune assemblies, regional federations, and so on, with the kind of representation that is direct and revocable, in the sense that representatives are directly answerable to and return directly to the well defined and integrated social group for which they speak in some higher order organization, something obviously very different than our system of representation.

Now it might very well be asked whether such a social structure is feasible in a complex, highly technological society. There are counter arguments, and I think they fall into two main categories. The first category is that such an organization is contrary to human nature, and the second category says roughly that it is incompatible with the demands of efficiency. I’d like to briefly consider each of these.

Consider the first, that a free society is contrary to human nature. It is often asked, do men really want freedom, do they want the responsibility that goes with it. Or would they prefer to be ruled by a benevolent master. Consistently, apologists for the existing distribution of power have held to one or another version of the idea of the happy slave. Two hundred years ago Rousseau denounced the sophistic politicians and intellectuals “who search for ways to obscure the fact,” so he maintained, “that the essential and the defining property of man is his freedom. They attribute to man a natural inclination to servitude, without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue. Their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself, and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them.” As proof of this doctrine he refers to the marvels done by all free peoples to guard themselves from oppression. “True” he says “those who have abandoned the life of a free man do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace, the repose they enjoy in their chains. But when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it, when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.” A comment to which we can perhaps give a contemporary interpretation.

Rather similar thoughts were expressed by Kant 40 years later. He cannot, he says, “accept the proposition that certain people are not right for freedom, for example, the serfs of some landlord. If one accepts this assumption, freedom will never be achieved. For one cannot arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it. One must be free to learn how to make use of ones powers freely and usefully. The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition, under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority. However, one can achieve reason only through ones own experiences, and one must be free to be able to undertake them. To accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under ones control and that one has the right to refuse it to them forever is an infringement on the right of God himself, who has created man to be free.”

This particular remark is interesting because of its context as well. Kant on this occasion was defending the French revolution during the terror against those who claimed that it showed the masses to be unready for the privilege of freedom. And his remarks, too, I think, have obvious contemporary relevance. No rational person will approve of violence and terror, and in particular the terror of the post-revolutionary state that has fallen into the hands of a grim autocracy has more than once reached indescribable levels of savagery. At the same time, no person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that often occurs, when long subdued masses rise against their oppressors or take their first steps toward liberty and social reconstruction.

Humboldt, just a few years before Kant, had expressed a view that was very similar to that. He also said that freedom and variety are the preconditions for human self-realization. “Nothing promotes this rightness for freedom so much as freedom itself. This truth perhaps may not be acknowledged by those who have so often used this unrightness as an excuse for continuing repression, but it seems to me to follow unquestionably from the very nature of man. The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power. To heighten this power is the only way to supply the want, but to do so presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity. Those who do not comprehend this may justly be suspected of misunderstanding human nature, and wishing to make men into machines.”

Rosa Luxemburg’s fraternal sympathetic critique of Bolshevik ideology and practice was given in very similar terms. “Only the active participation of the masses in self-government and social reconstruction could bring about the complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule, just as only their creative experience and spontaneous action can solve the myriad problems of creating a libertarian socialist society.”

She went on to say that historically the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest central committee, and I think that these remarks can be translated immediately for the somewhat parallel ideology of the soulful corporation which is now fairly popular among American academics. For example, Carl Kaysen writes: “No longer the agent of proprietorships seeking to maximize return on investment, management sees itself as responsible to stock holders, employees, customers, general public and perhaps most important the firm itself as an institution. There is no display of greed or graspingness, there is no attempt to push off on the workers and the community at least part of the social costs of the enterprise. The modern corporation is a soulful corporation.”

Similarly, the vanguard party is a soulful party. In both cases those who urge that men submit to the rule of these benevolent autocracies may, I think, justly be accused of wishing to make men into machines. Now, the correctness of the view that is expressed by Rousseau and Kant and Humboldt and Luxemburg and innumerable others, I don’t think that the correctness of this is for the moment susceptible to scientific proof. One can only evaluate it in terms of experience and intuition. But one can also point out the social consequences of adopting the view that men are born to be free, or that they are born to be ruled by benevolent autocrats.

What of the second question, the question of efficiency? Is democratic control of the industrial system, down to its smallest functional units, incompatible with efficiency? This is very frequently argued on several grounds. For example, some say that centralized management is a technological imperative, but I think the argument is exceedingly weak when one looks into it. The very same technology that brings relevant information to the board of managers can bring it at the time that it is needed to everyone in the work force. The technology that is now capable of eliminating the stupefying labor that turns men into specialized tools of production permits in principle the leisure and the educational opportunities that make them able to use this information in a rational way. Furthermore, even an economic elite which is dripping with soulfulness, to use Ralph Miliband’s phrase, is constrained by the system in which it functions to organize production for certain ends: power, growth, profit, but not in the nature of the case human needs, needs that to an ever more critical degree can be expressed only in collective terms. It is surely conceivable and is perhaps even likely that decisions made by the collective itself, will reflect these needs and interests as well as those made by various soulful elites.

In any event, it is a bit difficult to take seriously arguments about efficiency in a society that devotes such enormous resources to waste and destruction. As everyone knows, the very concept of efficiency is dripping with ideology. Maximization of commodities is hardly the only measure of a decent existence. The point is familiar, and no elaboration is necessary.

State Socialism and State Capitalism

Let me turn to the two final points of reference: the Bolshevik or state socialist and the state capitalist. As I have tried to suggest, they have points in common, and in interesting respects they diverge from the classical liberal ideal or its later elaboration in libertarian socialism. Since I am concerned with our society, let me make a few rather elementary observations about the role of the state, its likely evolution and the ideological assumptions that accompany and sometimes disguise these phenomena.

To begin with, it is obvious that we can distinguish two systems of power, the political system and the economic system. The former consists in principle of elected representatives of the people who set public policy. The latter in principle is a system of private power, a system of private empires, that are free from public control, except in the remote and indirect ways in which even a feudal nobility or a totalitarian dictatorship must be responsive to the public will. There are several immediate consequences of this organization of society.

The first is that in a subtle way an authoritarian cast of mind is induced in a very large mass of the population which is subject to arbitrary decree from above. I think that this has a great effect on the general character of the culture. The effect is the belief that one must obey arbitrary dictates and accede to authority. And I think that in fact a remarkable and exciting fact about the youth movement in recent years is that it is challenging and beginning to break down some of these authoritarian patterns.

The second fact that is important is that the range of decisions that are in principle subject to public democratic control is quite narrow. For example, it excludes in law in principle the central institutions in any advanced industrial society, i.e. the entire commercial, industrial and financial system. And a third fact is that even within the narrow range of issues that are submitted in principle to democratic decision making, the centers of private power of course exert an inordinately heavy influence in perfectly obvious ways, through control of the media, through control of political organizations or in fact by the simple and direct means of supplying the top personnel for the parliamentary system itself, as they obviously do. Richard Barnet in his recent study of the top 400 decision makers in the postwar national security system reports that most have, I quote now, “come from executive suites and law offices within shouting distance of each other, in 15 city blocks in 5 major cities.” And every other study shows the same thing.

In short, the democratic system at best functions within a narrow range in a capitalist democracy, and even within this narrow range its functioning is enormously biased by the concentrations of private power and by the authoritarian and passive modes of thinking that are induced by autocratic institutions such as industries, for example. It is a truism but one that must be constantly stressed that capitalism and democracy are ultimately quite incompatible. And a careful look at the matter merely strengthens this conclusion. There are perfectly obvious processes of centralization of control taking place in both the political and the industrial system. As far as the political system is concerned, in every parliamentary democracy, not only ours, the role of parliament in policy formation has been declining in the years since WWII, as everyone knows and political commentators repeatedly point out.

In other words, the executive becomes increasingly powerful as the planning functions of the state become more significant. The House Armed Services Committee a couple of years ago described the role of Congress as that of a sometimes querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance. And careful studies of civil military decisions since WWII show that this is quite an accurate perception.

Senator Vandenberg 20 years ago expressed his fear that the American chief executive would become the number one warlord of the earth, his phrase. That has since occurred. The clearest decision is the decision to escalate in Vietnam in February 1965, in cynical disregard of the expressed will of the electorate. This incident reveals, I think, with perfect clarity the role of the public in decisions about peace and war, the role of the public in decisions about the main lines about public policy in general. And it also suggests the irrelevance of electoral politics to major decisions of national policy.

Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that this ruling elite is pretty clear about its social role. As an example take Robert McNamara, who is the person widely praised in liberal circles for his humanity, his technical brilliance and his campaign to control the military. His views of social organization, I think, are quite illuminating. He says that vital decision making in policy matters as well as in business must remain at the top. That is partly, though not completely, what the top is for. And he goes on to suggest that this is apparently a divine imperative. I quote: “God is clearly democratic, he distributes brain power universally, but he quite justifiably expects us to do something efficient and constructive with that priceless gift. That’s what management is all about. Management in the end is the most creative of all the arts, for its medium is human talent itself. The real threat to democracy comes from under-management. The under-management of society is not the respect of liberty, it is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. If it is not reason that rules man then man falls short of his potential.”

So reason then is to be identified as the centralization of decision making at the top in the hands of management. Popular involvement in decision making is a threat to liberty, a violation of reason. Reason is embodied in autocratic, tightly managed institutions. Strengthening these institutions within which man can function most efficiently is, in his words, “the great human adventure of our times.” All this has a faintly familiar ring to it. It is the authentic voice of the technical intelligentsia, the liberal intelligentsia of the technocratic corporate elite in a modern society.

There is a parallel process of centralization in economic life. A recent FTC report notes that the 200 largest manufacturing corporations now control about two thirds of all manufacturing assets. At the beginning of WWII the same amount of power was spread over a thousand corporations. The report says: “A small industrial elite of huge conglomerate companies is gobbling up American business and largely destroying competitive free enterprise.” Furthermore it says: “These two hundred corporations are partially linked with each other and with other corporations in ways that may prevent or discourage independent behavior in market decisions.” What is novel about such observations is only their source, the FTC. They are familiar, to the point of cliche, among left-liberal commentators on American society.

The centralization of power also has an international dimension. Quoting from Foreign Affairs, it has been pointed that “on the basis of the gross value of their output, US enterprises abroad in the aggregate comprise the third largest country in the world, with a gross product greater than that of any country except the United States and the Soviet Union. American firms control over half the automobile industry in England, almost 40% of petroleum in Germany, over 40% of the telegraphic, telephone and electronic and business equipment in France, 75% of the computers. Within a decade, given present trends, more than half of the British exports will be from American owned companies.” Furthermore, these are highly-concentrated investments: 40% of direct investment in Germany, France and Britain is by three firms, American firms.

George Ball has explained that the project of constructing an integrated world economy, dominated by American capital, an empire in other words, is no idealistic pipe dream, but a hard headed prediction. It is a role, he says, into which we are being pushed by the imperatives of our own economy, the major instrument being the multinational corporation which George Ball describes as follows: “In its modern form, the multinational corporation, or one with worldwide operations and markets, is a distinctly American development. Through such corporations it has become possible for the first time to use the world’s resources with maximum efficiency. But there must be greater unification of the world economy to give full play to the benefits of multinational corporations.”

These multinational corporations are the beneficiary of the mobilization of resources by the federal government, and its world wide operations and markets are backed ultimately by American military force, now based in dozens of countries. It is not difficult to guess who will reap the benefits from the integrated world economy, which is the domain of operation of these American based international economic institutions.

At this stage in the discussion one has to mention the specter of communism. What is the threat of communism to this system? For a clear and cogent answer, one can turn to an extensive study of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and National Planning Association called the Political Economy of American Foreign Policy, a very important book. It was compiled by a representative segment of the tiny elite that largely sets public policy for whoever is technically in office. In effect, it’s as close as you can come to a manifesto of the American ruling class.

Here they define the primary threat of communism as “the economic transformation of the communist powers in ways which reduce their willingness or ability to complement the industrial economies of the West.” That is the primary threat of communism. Communism, in short, reduces the willingness and ability of underdeveloped countries to function in the world capitalist economy in the manner of, for example, the Philippines which has developed a colonial economy of a classic type, after 75 years of American tutelage and domination. It is this doctrine which explains why British economist Joan Robinson describes the American crusade against communism as a crusade against development.

The cold war ideology and the international communist conspiracy function in an important way as essentially a propaganda device to mobilize support at a particular historical moment for this long time imperial enterprise. In fact, I believe that this is probably the main function of the cold war. It serves as a useful device for the managers of American society and their counterparts in the Soviet Union to control their own populations and their own respective imperial systems. I think that the persistence of the cold war can be in part explained by its utility for the managers of the two great world systems.

There is one final element that has to be added to this picture, namely the ongoing militarization of American society. How does this enter in? To see, one has to look back at WWII and to recall that prior to WWII, of course, we were deep in the depression. WWII taught an important economic lesson, it taught the lesson that government induced production in a carefully controlled economy – centrally controlled – could overcome the effects of a depression.

I think this is what Charles E. Wilson had in mind at the end of 1944 when he proposed that we have a permanent war economy in the postwar world. Of course, the trouble is that in a capitalist economy there are only a number of ways in which government intervention can take place. It can’t be competitive with the private empires for example, which is to say that it can’t be any useful production. In fact, it has to be the production of luxury goods, goods not capital, not useful commodities, which would be competitive. And unfortunately there is only one category of luxury goods that can be produced endlessly with rapid obsolescence, quickly wasting, and no limit on how many of them you can use. We all know what that is.

This whole matter is described pretty well by the business historian Alfred Chandler. He describes the economic lessons of WWII as follows: “The government spent far more than the most enthusiastic New Dealer had ever proposed. Most of the output of the expenditures was destroyed or left on the battlefields of Europe or Asia but the resulting increased demand sent the nation into a period of prosperity, the likes of which had never before been seen. Moreover, the supplying of huge armies and navies fighting the most massive war of all time required a tight centralized control of the national economy. This effort brought corporate managers to Washington to carry out one of the most complex pieces of economic planning in history. That experience lessened the ideological fears over the government’s role in stabilizing the economy.”

This is a conservative commentator, I might point out. It may be added that the ensuing cold war carried further the depoliticization of the American society and created the kind of psychological environment in which the government is able to intervene in part through fiscal policies, in part through public work and public services, but very largely, of course, through defense spending.

In this way, to use Alfred Chandler’s words, “the government acts as a coordinator of last resort when managers are unable to maintain a high level of aggregate demand.” As another conservative business historian, Joseph Monsen, writes, “enlightened corporate managers, far from fearing government intervention in the economy, view the new economics as a technique for increasing corporate viability.”

Of course, the most cynical use of these ideas is by the managers of the publicly subsidized war industries. There was a remarkable series in the Washington Post about a year ago, by Bernard Nossiter. For example, he quoted Samuel Downer, financial vice president of LTV Aerospace, one of the big new conglomerates, who explained why the postwar world must be bolstered by military orders. He said: “Its selling appeal is the defense of the home. This is one of the greatest appeals the politicians have to adjusting the system. If you’re the president and you need a control factor in the economy, and you need to sell this factor, you can’t sell Harlem and Watts but you can sell self-preservation, a new environment. We are going to increase defense budgets as long as those bastards in Russia are ahead of us. The American people understand this.”

Of course, those bastards aren’t exactly ahead of us in this deadly and cynical game, but that is only a minor embarrassment to the thesis. In times of need, we can always follow Dean Rusk, Hubert Humphrey and other luminaries and appeal to the billion Chinese armed to the teeth and setting out on world conquest.

Again, I want to emphasize the role in this system of the cold war as a technique of domestic control, a technique for developing the climate of paranoia and psychosis in which the tax payer will be willing to provide an enormous endless subsidy to the technologically advanced sectors of American industry and the corporations that dominate this increasingly centralized system.

Of course, it is perfectly obvious that Russian imperialism is not an invention of American ideologists. It is real enough for the Hungarians and the Czechs, for example. What is an invention is the uses to which it is put, for example by Dean Acheson in 1950 or Walt Rostow a decade later, when they pretend that the Vietnam war is an example of Russian imperialism. Or by the Johnson administration in 1965 when it justifies the Dominican intervention with reference to the Sino-Soviet military bloc. Or by the Kennedy intellectuals, who as Townsend Hoopes put it in an article in the Washington Monthly in the last month, were deluded by the tensions of the cold war years, and could not perceive that the triumph of the national revolution in Vietnam would not be a triumph for Moscow and Peking. It was the most remarkable degree of delusion on the part of presumably literate men.

Or, for example, by Eugene Rostow who in a recent book that was very widely praised by liberal senators and academic intellectuals, outlined the series of challenges to world order in the modern era as follows: “Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler,” and continuing in the postwar world, “general strikes in France and Italy, the civil war in Greece, and the attack on South Vietnam where Russia has put us to severe tests in its efforts to spread communism by the sword.”

This is a very interesting series of challenges to world order: Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, general strikes in France and Italy, the civil war in Greece and the Russian attack on South Vietnam. If one thinks it through, he can reach some pretty interesting conclusions about modern history.

One can continue with this indefinitely. I mean to suggest that the cold war is highly functional both to the American elite and its Soviet counterpart who in a perfectly similar way exploit Western imperialism, which they did not invent, as they send their armies into Czechoslovakia.

It is important in both cases in providing an ideology for empire and for the government subsidized system here of military capitalism. It is predictable then that the challenges to this ideology will be bitterly resisted, by force if necessary. In many ways, American society is indeed open and liberal values are preserved. However, as poor people and black people and other ethnic minorities know very well, the liberal veneer is pretty thin. Mark Twain once wrote that “it is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” Those who lack the prudence may well pay the cost.

Roughly speaking, I think it is accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure. The people, so-called, do exercise an occasional choice among those who Marx once called the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes. Those who find this characterization too harsh may prefer the formulations of a modern democratic theorist like Joseph Schumpeter who describes modern political democracy, favorably, “as a system in which the deciding of issues by the electorate is secondary to the election of the men who are to do the deciding. The political party”, he says accurately, “is a group whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power. If that were not so, it would be impossible for different parties to adopt exactly or almost exactly the same program.” That’s all the advantages of political democracy, as he sees it.

This program that both parties adopt more or less exactly and the individuals who compete for power express a narrow conservative ideology, basically the interests of one or another element in the corporate elite, with some modifications. This is obviously no conspiracy. I think it is simply implicit in the system of corporate capitalism. These people and the institutions they represent are in effect in power, and their interests are the national interest. It is this interest that is served primarily and overwhelmingly by the overseas empire and the growing system of military state capitalism at home.

If we were to withdraw the consent of the governed, as I think we should, we are withdrawing our consent to have these men and the interests they represent, govern and manage American society and impose their concept of world order and their criteria for legitimate political and economic development in much of the world. Although an immense effort of propaganda and mystification is carried on to conceal these facts, nonetheless facts they remain.

We have today the technical and material resources to meet man’s animal needs. We have not developed the cultural and moral resources or the democratic forms of social organization that make possible the humane and rational use of our material wealth and power. Conceivably, the classical liberal ideals, as expressed and developed in their libertarian socialist form, are achievable. But if so, only by a popular revolutionary movement, rooted in wide strata of the population, and committed to the elimination of repressive and authoritarian institutions, state and private. To create such a movement is the challenge we face and must meet if there is to be an escape from contemporary barbarism.

________

Text source here.

The post Government in the future – Noam Chomsky appeared first on Void Network.

When I was writing my review of Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn, I thought that I would end by comparing the Bevins and Nunes. Like Bevins, Nunes’s theoretical tract is a “response to the cycle of struggles that began in 2011” but unlike Bevins, Nunes does not think that the failures of this cycle of struggles can be attributed to ideology alone. While he does offer a critique of “horizontalism,” like Bevins, he recognizes that this ideology is, in part, a response to certain underlying material conditions that remain, for better or worse, unavoidable. The nature of capitalist society has changed and so, therefore, has the nature of class struggle. Leaving aside whether this would be desirable or not, attempting to turn back the clock to an era in which unions and parties and other formal organizations mediated class struggle is itself ideological, an expression of left melancholy that needs to be overcome.

So what is it that has changed? The place to look for answers is in the heart of the book, “Elements for a Theory of Organisation 1.” As Nunes writes, “the idea of horizontality” emerges for three reasons: “an increased awareness of the interconnectedness brought about by capitalist globalization; the discovery of the organizing and mobilizing affordance provided by the internet; and the inspiration coming from autonomous movements in the Global South, especially the Zapatistas in Mexico and those that emerged in Argentina in the wake of the 2001 crisis.” In other words, while the “idea of horizontality” may be ideology, what it responds to are very real changes in the nature of society: globalization, information technology, and new form of class struggle emerging in response to these. Note how different this account is from Bevins, who attributes horizontalism—or the idea of horizontality—to ideology alone. As he writes later in the chapter:

Today’s revolts emerge from a conjuncture marked by the convergence of four historical trends that, at least for now, appear irreversible. The first is the increasing mediatisation of everyday life, and specifically the use of digital platforms that generate an enormous potential for what Manuel Castells dubbed “mass self-communication.” The second is the vertiginous drop in organising costs resulting from that, which enables complex collective coordination on a scale that in the past could only have been achieved through mass organisations. The third is the crisis of the “post-political” centrist consensus dominant in most countries since the end of the Cold War, which has intensified a long-running loss of confidence in liberal democratic institutions across the world. The fourth is the decline, in membership as well as political relevance, of most mass organisations that played a central role in convoking and organising popular struggles in the twentieth century.

Only reason 3 is a matter of ideology—the others are material changes in the nature of contemporary life that are irreversible except through other material changes. Fighting against the ideology of horizontalism without addressing these underlying material conditions is quixotic because these new forms offer both potentials and drawbacks. The easiness of networked organizing outcompetes formal organizations time and again, and therefore one must accept that, for the time being, this will be a big part of the mix, even if one imagines, as Nunes does, an important role for formal organizations. The result of this recognition is that Nunes suggests we stop thinking about organization as formal organization alone but look at “organisational ecology” which includes both formal and informal organization. In fact, Nunes argues that since the 1960s and 1970s this ecological perspective has been implicitly adopted by movements where a leading formal organization was lacking, such as “Autonomia” or “the movement of ‘77” in Italy and the Gay and Women’s Liberation Movements.

This brings us to some of the most important points of the book, with regard to contemporary debates about organization. Today there is a tendency to treat organization as a quantity which can be measured—organization is something which class struggle today lacks, either in whole or in part, and therefore the problems confronting us are problems of “disorganization.” But for Nunes organization is just what there is, and what some people describe as disorganization is simply a different form of organization. This is a point that has been made many times before, including by me. What people describe as spontaneous, reflexive, and disorganized is often, in fact, quite organized. Riots don’t lack organization, though they do typically lack formal organization. Contemporary movements are, in fact, a kind of fractal—when you zoom in on the disorganization of the riot what you find are, in fact, planned, conscious actions that merely appear disorganized in aggregate. This insight applies the other way, too. When one examines the behavior of a formal organization, what often appears highly organized in aggregate is often quite spontaneous, unplanned, or chaotic when one zooms in, since all kinds of decisions taken within organizations are done so informally. “Spontaneity” is therefore a particularly problematic concept.

Nunes also offers a criticism of another concept, “self-organization,” that is often used by the ultraleft to describe the power of informal organization. But what is the self of self-organization? What we call self-organization is often not really very self-organized but rather in response to some kind of other-organization. In class society, and in struggles against it, there is no real self-organization, since that would imply full autonomy for the self-organized group when, in fact, what we describe as self-organization is a reaction to heteronomy—to the fact of being organized by bosses, cops, unions, and parties.

The critique of self-organization that Nunes offers is gotten at by way of the discourse of cybernetics, and particularly second-order cybernetics. Cybernetics is, in some senses, a study of self-organization. It defines animals, people, machines, and even organizations by their capacity to act on and regulate themselves through circular causality. But any organism deemed self-organizing is always in relation to whatever is outside the self, from which it derives energy, resources, etc. Even though the human body self-regulates it isn’t really self-organized since it is partly produced by forces outside itself, hence second-order cybernetics. This is a useful framework and one of the best aspects of the book is the way it takes ideas from cybernetics and shows their utility. As much as this discourse has been used by capitalism to naturalize economy and society, there are some important truths contained within it, and for better or worse, we can’t get away from the language of “emergence” when it comes to describing society and its class struggle. Without the notion of emergence, it becomes hard to understand how things happen without anyone intending them. Though the Hegelian dialectic is another way to get at this, “emergence” is here to stay and helps explain how movements always surprise us and how they unfold in ways that are beyond the control of individuals

In a subsequent chapter, I will offer some criticisms of Nunes, and indicate some of the problems with his approach.

I wanted to indicate why I think the Nunes book is important, useful, and underrated. Now I want to spell out some of my criticisms of the book.

My first criticism is that I think the account which we get in the book of the emergence of the “network paradigm” lays the emphasis too much on technological change, and the internet in particular. Of the four causes that Nunes gives for this emergence—information technology; cheaper organizing via information technology, the crisis of centrism, and the waning of workers’ parties and unions—the fourth is, in my view, the most important, whereas Nunes’s book lays emphasis on the first two. (I should add that I think 1 and 2 are the same, and 3 not a real thing). But we can easily deduce that the fourth is the determinative cause since the examples he gives of “organizational ecology” date from the 1970s and not the 1990s. If the ecological view emerges with the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements or the “area of Autonomy” in Italy in 1977 and not the networked, alter-globalizing Zapatista Liberation Army, then we cannot attribute it to digital technology primarily. The crisis of the parties and unions—or what Endnotes and others have described as “end of workers’ identity” of the “end of the workers’ movement” or “programmatism”—emerges much earlier than digital technology, and is therefore determinative.

Furthermore, some of what Nunes attributes to the network paradigm has been a consistent feature of class struggle for as long as we have examples. Informal organization—aggregate action—has always been part of the mix, and we can find recognition of this “self-activity” in Marx, Luxemburg, and others. Nearly every revolution has begun as a consequence of informal organization with formal organizations playing catch up. Since the 1990s, digital technology has acted as a multiplier for this kind of informal organization, but the decline of formal working-class organization is, in my view, far more consequential. Adopting an evolutionary framework, Nunes argues that informal organizing now out-competes formal organization as a result of the low levels of initial investment digital technology affords—anybody can, potentially, reach millions with a single tweet or TikTok. In a fascinating moment in the text, Nunes suggest that, rather than an era without vanguards, digital technology has allowed nearly anyone to become a vanguard, such that the leadership function, rather than having disappeared, has been distributed more widely. Anyone who has participated in contemporary social movements will recognize the truth of this assertion, even if when, we trace things back to their origins, we often find the actions of vouched groups rather than scattered individuals. Aggregate action (informal organization) and collective action (formal organization) are always co-present. It’s not that intentional, deliberate action has disappeared—in fact there is more of it than ever, it’s just that now it’s in the hands of more people.

In assigning relative weight to these various causes, we should place emphasis, however, on the inability of formal organizations to “get the goods” and downgrade the lower investment allowed by digital technology. The affordances of the digital are not, in this regard, all that different than print—or graffiti, for that matter—which is why we see the “ecological” paradigm emerging in the 1960s and 1970s and not the 1990s. In the era of the classical workers’ movement—let’s date it from 1871-1968, for convenience—the unions and parties which were able to assert partial leadership over social movements did so because they were able to deliver tangible benefits to participants through bilateral negotiations with the state and capitalists. But today we live in an era in which, to put it bluntly, due to weakening growth, elites are much less willing to negotiate. There is no longer a compromise position and class struggle has become much more zero-sum. As such, the fruits of formal organization are diminished as a function of investment in such organization, and it is this which explains their decline, and the preference for informal organization, not some deleterious ideology emerging from the Port Huron Statement and sent around the world. It’s not so much that informal organization has become cheaper but that everything else has become more expensive.

The other problems with Nunes’s approach might be described as formalism and monism. Nunes offers us a theory of “political organisation” and not a theory of revolution or communism. As such, its strengths (its lucidity about organisation) rest on weaknesses. In its Spinozism, it defines organization as the “capacity to act” and “produce political effects” but are all capacities and effects equal? While Nunes states that his aim is a theory of political organization rather than organization as such, it’s hard to see how his definition is specific enough to emancipatory, revolutionary, or communist organization—ie, the forms of organization we care about. Doesn’t this definition work for fascist organization as well? Doesn’t it describe the organizing forms of the state and capital? Are those not “political”? A related problem is that (revolutionary, emancipatory) political organizations are usually described and analyzed in the book without any reference to antagonist organizations. But the goal of communist organization is not just to multiply the power of such organizations but to negate the already-existing organizations by which proletarians are always already organized: the organizations of capitalism and the state. In other words, the theory of political organization we get in Nunes’s book lacks negativity and does not sufficiently distinguish emancipatory from counter-emancipatory organizations. This is because its definition of organization is formalist or perhaps functionalist but is missing “content,” missing a sense of what such organization is for, ultimately—ie, the production of classless, moneyless, stateless society. It is possible that such a society can be defined as a kind of organization but the book does not do so.

Marx’s definition of communism as a state of affairs in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” shares something with Nunes’s definition of organization as “capacity to act” but contains some additional predicates. Development is not only capacity to act but capacity to cultivate new capacities and experiences. In other words, we can’t define organization formally but must think about content, about what people want and what people are. This is something which Nunes resists, given the post-Althusserian and antihumanist theory he relies on, but I don’t think it can be avoided if we want to develop a theory of emancipatory organization.

____

SOURCE: https://jasperbernes.substack.com/p/organization-and-its-theories

The post Organization and Its Theories- by Jasper Bernes 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.