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.

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.

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.

In January of this year, while eco-justice activists were redecorating the Mona Lisa at the Louvre to protest climate change, French farmers besieged several French cities in protest against a range of policies threatening the material foundations of their way of life. In response to recent increases in agricultural costs due to the war in Ukraine and a drop in prices due to free trade policies implemented by the EU, tractors blocked the A6, a major highway leading into Paris, and in the south, farmers dumped manure and other agricultural waste on the front steps of city hall in Toulouse. The protests followed several months of protest at the end of 2023, and were echoed a month later by further protests in February of 2024.

The following article from Lundimatin seeks to provide some historical and existential context for the revolt, and to challenge some of the reflexes and assumptions of the left’s response. The article is of interest to us for two reasons. First, it helps explain the material basis of resistance to the mega-basins by organizations like Soulevement du Terre as well as the larger division between urban and rural workers in France. Second, it provides an excellent example of the kind of gap between contemporary leftist political categories and reflexes and the experience of rural workers that continues to provide an opening to the right wing, both in France and elsewhere. We take it to be the responsibility of partisans everywhere to find ways to close this gap and hope this article will make some contribution to that effort.

Charlatan Revolutionary Group

published in lundimatin#413, January 30, 2024

In recent days, we’ve seen prefectures covered in manure and set on fire, mutual insurance companies set ablaze, “foreign” trucks turned over by tractors and their food distributed to Restos du Cœur or burned on the asphalt. There are calls to surround Paris, others to rename the Élysée “Le Lisier” and a government particularly concerned not to add fuel to the fire. A ready-made media narrative, coordinated by both politicians and FNSEA representatives, has led us to view this movement solely from their point of view, i.e., their interests: agribusiness is allegedly engaged in a tug-of-war with the State to recoup a little cash and exert pressure against ecological regulations that are squeezing their margins. All this in a brown, reactionary and conservative atmosphere. Good. The Groupe Révolutionnaire Charlatan has sent us this text, which aims to approach the question by way of a completely different axiom: trying to understand revolt from its historical and ethical coordinates.

Lenin against the Muzhiks

“We have learned how to overthrow the bourgeoisie, how to suppress them, and we are proud of the fact. But we have not yet learned how to regulate our relations with the millions of middle peasants, how to win their confidence, and we must frankly admit it.”

– Lenin, speech to the ^8th Congress of the CPSU

In public school history curricula we’re given all the great stages of “progress”–the Industrial Revolution, the rural exodus, the Republic–as a single uninterrupted series of pliant modifications, useful amenities, and welcome improvements to the lifestyles of backwards populations, thanks of course to the philanthropic efforts of an intrepid urban elite trained in the school of economic rationality. It’s this vision–not too far off from the one behind the colonial project–that we have in mind today when we talk about the peasant world.

The reality of primitive accumulation, the forced displacement of populations, and the obliteration of the rural world–the land, the languages and the peasant way of life all included–is still seen in many left-wing circles as a positive and necessary stage that, with all the promise of mechanization, is supposed to bring about an egalitarian society, free to decide on its modes and methods of production; in short, industry as a necessary step in the socialization of our means of existence.

After killing their boyars and dividing up their lands equally, the muzhiks registered thousands of grievances with the Petrograd Soviet and voted for the socialist-revolutionaries in droves, unaware, however, that with the ideological confusion that was Bolshevik modernization, a tsarless Moscow was still scheming against them. All they needed was 100,000 tractors to get the peasants out of the way of the only real historical struggle, that between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. The rest of society, their ways of life, their revolutions, were much less important; and a decade later they could be put to death by the thousands, at least those of them branded “kulaks”—anyone with the misfortune of owning two cows, an unconscionable sign of allegiance to the petty-bourgeoisie.

Of course this loaded history has no parallel with the contemporary situation in France, where the peasantry has all but disappeared. But it is indicative of how deep the left’s blind spots can cut, and of the plethora of social groups that still coexist in complete ignorance of one another. We firmly believe that a “revolutionary,” if such a thing exists, is whomever brings about revolution, regardless of his or her background or beliefs; anyone who, when society reaches the point of no return, takes a resolute stand for a new world.

It therefore seems useful to give a brief overview of the rural world in modern France, in order to better evaluate its current political situation. Revolutionary theory does not make abstract proclamations from on high, with the overarching goals of an outmoded theoretical system; it descends into the masses, tries to make sense of the clandestine promises of emancipation and the repressed desires for an egalitarian world that dwell in the heart of each individual—and, putting this secret discourse into a system, giving it a vocabulary, it extends the means to speak the language of revolution to everyone.

The peasant world since the second world war

“The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat.”

“The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control.”

– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

In so far as it is possible to describe the peasant as the land’s most literal inhabitant–living off the earth and giving direct expression to the social and cultural singularity of his region through his customs, dialect and way of life–it should be made clear from the outset that this is not how the right sees them. This peasant–who is no longer with us–lived in their own civilization, with its own languages, traditions, ingrained particularities, as well as its own symbolic and religious systems. This dense web of particularisms was an obstacle to the projects of the State–the tax inspector and the soldier alike. How could they make their way in a world that spoke its own language, where the land was farmed as the people saw fit, and whose inhabitants may or not have given themselves family names–that could change from one village to the next?

The eradication of this incongruous race was therefore an integral part of the modernization effort, nullifying its particularities, mapping its lands, turning the father into the de facto representative of the group, and conscripting its sons to die in wars. But the earth has a thick skin, and it wasn’t until after the Second World War that this unification effort reached its final phase.

The material and social foundations of this very particular world were swept away during the Marshall Plan era by a series of structural modifications and intensive mechanization: hedgerows were cut down, ditches filled in, and gigantic plots marked out to be plowed by tractors driven by a new generation of farmers trained by Jesuits and Dominican modernizers in agricultural technical schools. The state invested billions in this project. In 1954 there were 230,000 tractors in France; by 1963, 950,000. The consequence of this acceleration was the definitive decapitation of a large part of the farming population, unable to expand and mechanize, and thus unable to compete.

A competitive labor market, productivity gains, crushing competition from small businesses, all of which ensured solid growth and consumption as a means of redistribution: nothing too harmful, as any liberal economics textbook will tell you.

But what became of the man on his iron machine? With all the family farms gone, all his neighbors became agricultural laborers or fled to the city, and he was left to feed the monster: to stay competitive in a capitalist economy, you have to keep moving. More land, more fertilizer, more machines. There are few subjects the various ideologies of modernization agree more on: working the land is a kind of bondage, a thankless task that weighs on the individual, confining him to his plot of land and the shadows of the pre-enlightened world. As it turned out, the technical and economic needs of the luminous modern world were leading the planet to its doom, and in the meantime creating a class of wage-earning consumers with a dull, repetitive existence, probably not that different from that of the workers of yesteryear–the kind of same dependence, only with gadgets and processed food. The modern farmer found his own new form of bondage in agro-industrial techniques.

This new technological dependence has three faces: dependence on the enormous debt amassed from the purchase of machinery and land; dependence on the agro-industrial networks that manage all stages of production and control all regulatory bodies; and dependence finally on the machine itself and its dynamics. After all, if your neighbor can buy a bigger tractor, buy smaller farmers off their land and fertilize to excess, how could you possibly beat his prices? With competitive markets and private property, farmers became each other’s executioners, just like the rest of society.

This logic only intensified with France’s entry into the European Union and the Common Market. Although the early days of agro-industry had a certain kind of success in France–i.e. increased competition–this situation came to a standstill in the 1980s, when the European market was flooded with cheaper products from other countries, while the creation of the WTO and the signing of several treaties ratified the end of customs protections.

Article 135 of the Treaty of Lisbon straightforwardly prohibits social harmonization, making it impossible for member countries to demand Europe-wide standards for labor rights. That would hardly be in the spirit of competition!

Modernization can therefore be summed up as a mixture of interdependent elements: land consolidation, a reduction in the number of farmers, an increase in the number of industrial farms, the dominance of monoculture, dependence on machines, inputs and chemistry.

All of this contributed to the current situation: from 2,500,000 farms in 1955, only 400,000 remain today, and the new European standards will cut large swathes out of that number too. The decline is first and foremost that of peasant farming, swept away in the progress of a system that has conquered French soil, and which feeds the misfortune and destitution of thousands of farmers everyday.

Agribusiness and the FNSEA

As with the cops, the same people we see in the media capitalizing on the number of suicides in the profession are often the same who instigated the working conditions and modes of sociability that caused them; a reactionary union like the Alliance Police Nationale–just like the FNSEA, in fact, defender of corporations and large-scale cereal production in the north of France–is only really there to boost careers, keep the dirty laundry in house, and maintain a lobby on behalf of the institution’s least scrupulous members. The FNSEA is particularly mafia-like in this respect.

But the transformation of agriculture into an institutional and corporatist structure is at least as complicated as the tidal wave-like upheaval of the mental and physical universe of those caught up in its gears. The left’s feverish eagerness to round things up into its own categories reveals a profound inability to grasp the social dynamics of certain sectors, and the prevalence of ideas and relationships to the State that differ from their own.

What does this eagerness tell us? That its contemptuous (and contemptible) ignorance of the agricultural world, with all its fractures and contradictions, keep it from attaining any real grasp on current events that doesn’t fall back on the truncated categories of a moralistic, urban leftism.

Let’s be clear: the FNSEA is still a powerful force, with many high hopes behind it and with its hand still on a number of levers. But when it comes to revolution, and all the more so in an age that’s lost all sight of class politics, union membership and electoral politics don’t tell us much about the real, concrete political dispositions of different groups. A number of past struggles have already revealed the inability of the Left’s intellectual software to comprehend the desires, sensitivities and pain of those belonging to certain social categories. This has long been the case, for example, with the suburban youth.

For city dwellers ignorant of the agricultural world’s many “faces,” it’s difficult to differentiate between the small-plot farmer, the large landowner and the “peasant” businessman. The figure of Arnaud Rousseau makes this flagrantly clear whenever he tires of running the same corporations behind the agro-industrial system, and goes on television to defend the interests of farmers, only to end up demanding measures to protect the economic model he himself profits from.

This powerful agri-business is the necessary consequence of the economies of scale required by land consolidation: by establishing gigantic monocultures to avoid paying for a larger variety of expensive machinery, we no longer have the resilience of a polyculture and end up with only two or three types of products to send to market. The only outlet for our production is the food industry. Scale up this pattern and here we are, irrevocably dependent on the logistics and chemical sectors, seed and livestock suppliers, slaughterhouses and so on. Over-specialization necessarily leads to dependence on industry at several levels; and as the FNSEA dominates the chambers of agriculture, it falls into a mafia-like arrangement between all the industrial sectors involved, from suppliers to supermarkets, to extract maximum profit from the farmer.

The farmer, on the other hand, is now an entrepreneur-worker saddled with debt–200,000 euros on average. A paradoxical double-bind: proletarian arms on capitalist shoulders, bound to technology and global commerce at the same time as a world experienced as rural and remote. Proletarianized in Marx’s sense because dispossessed of the means of production, in Wallerstein’s sense because blocked off from any possibility of buying and selling locally, and in Debord’s sense because deprived of a way of life. The disintegration of local communities reached the countryside and created, as in the rest of modern society, a decline in direct solidarities, the rise of consumer individualism, careerism and the middle-class, with the knowledge to boot of a fleeting population, only aggravating the sense of social isolation.

It is essential to understand the collapse of this world and the moral shock and the resulting sense of abandonment, if we are to fully comprehend what the farmers are asking for. The Gilets Jaunes stood at the periphery of the middle classes: people who had been promised the same lifestyle as upper-class consumers, particularly those living in cities, and who bitterly saw these hopes swept away by the economic slump. Farmers come from that same world, but with very different working conditions: after all, if it’s possible to set a human being to the cadences of a salaried routine–cities, with their traffic, commercial districts and giant dormitories are there for just that–it’s difficult to impose the same rhythm on the land. Even when industrialized to death, agriculture remains dependent on a host of natural and biological parameters that are difficult to adapt to the needs of the Market and Government–even if many engineers see it differently in their sick dreams.

Part of the left is trying to make up for this by replaying the old figure of the “model” working-class proletarian. There are thus good workers and bad bosses; the good, unionized “rank and file” ready for revolt, and the ever-scheming reformist “leadership.” And then there’s the inevitably reviled National Rally vote, but that’s for the wealthy elites to take care of, because, as we all know, good conscience always comes at a price.

On the institutional left, masters in the art of recuperation, it’s on the theme of Euroscepticism that the problem lies. With criticism of the European Union having been largely abandoned to the sovereigntist right, and part of the far right too, the institutional left is forced to limit its arguments to the demand for food security and better agricultural wages. The European Union pays subsidies to 8 out of 10 farmers–400,000 out of 500,000. The progressive plan relies on the Chambers of Agriculture, the national agency for agricultural management created a hundred years ago. In short, the aim is to make something of a reserve force for the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, subsidizing the few farmers that remain with redistributive policies implemented at the national level, and all this against a backdrop of a downward trend in the number of European farmers.

From the Gilets Jaunes to the Garbage Riots

Our aim in this text is to demonstrate that it’s no surprise that the minority factions of the ultra-left are systematically ultra-confused in the face of an event like this, incapable of grasping its meaning and scope; and that certain basic facts need to be reviewed if that faction that calls itself revolutionary is to live up to its own task. We won’t even mention the helpless gesticulations coming from the parliamentary left, who’ll try anything to seem like the defender of a people who no longer recognizes it. Their constant state of alarmism with regards to the far right is nothing more than the desperate discourse of electoralism, still trying to sell us the prophecy of a defiant electoral victory as the only way to save ourselves from the threat they pose. As far as we’re concerned, the real obstacle to mounting a counterattack is precisely the disempowerment of the citizen that comes from the vote itself.

What’s happening on the road blockades escapes both this electoral logic and the usual workings of social dialogue and its intermediaries–despite their being undermined by Macronian politics. François Purseigle is missing the point whenever he mentions the sociological differences between farmers and the Gilets Jaunes. Whether or not the former are closer to the upper sociopolitical categories or the lower is of no interest to us: what does matter is that yet another sector of the population is starting to refuse the institutional monopoly on politics.

The comparison with the Gilets Jaunes can only go so far: the revolt in winter 2018 was not a redundant occurrence, destined to be repeated, but the start of a whole new sequence in French politics. It shows a cruel lack of imagination to identify and compare events without recognizing the evolution taking place from one to the next. Nothing repeats itself; trends emerge, evolve and modify themselves. This is the only context in which comparison is really of any use, otherwise it does little more than feed a defeatist fetishism like that which took hold of the Champs-Élysées recently–which is not to be totally discarded, but it doesn’t represent the best use of our time and energy. The strength of the Gilets Jaunes movement lies in its capacity for constant renewal, its ability to pop up anywhere. Need we remind you?

The only repetitions in this case are the failure to confine the unrest to the union mold, to sort those causing the trouble into a few predefined factions, and to harness the movement with a few recognized spokespersons and watchwords. Just like the early days of the Gilets Jaunes, the movement is becoming autonomous, starting from a trigger point and broadening in a haphazard way towards a general feeling of exasperation. This vague but powerful sentiment is a very important indicator: it reveals the system’s inability to reproduce itself, a contradiction that has reached a point of unsustainability. We know that part of the population can no longer live as it used to; but what’s even more radical is that it can no longer imagine living as it used to–quite a shocking shift to come to terms with.

To go back to the events of 2023, we said in a text from the time that the shift we were seeing in strategies and in the widespread feeling of upheaval was struggling to produce a shift in minds and discourse.^[1] What made the Gilets Jaunes so powerful–the shared feeling of having to start from scratch in order to succeed, the revolt that was unleashed as soon as a desire to regain control of our lives was born, the constant inventiveness, the revival of old, outdated forms of struggle–the Garbage riots failed to capture. Everyone recognized something new in the events that took place at the Place de la Concorde, instinctively understanding the new possibilities looming in the shared feeling of frustration with our passivity; a huge swathe of what hitherto had been impossible ceased to be so. It was the opposite of a crisis, the opposite of a stalemate: it was momentum. Hence the chaotically scattered marches, the new slogans, the unexpected convergences, the enormous sense of motivation.

What drained this momentum was the impossibility of translating it into everyday language, into the way we talk to each other about the situation.

This new situation existed only in embryo, in the collective unconscious. The repressive routine of union marches and the politicking of central government officials, who moved the dates around, blocked the coordination of strikes and riots, and prevented the prolonging of strikes. It was only by accident that any of these tactics were undermined in the first place. All this was overcome only by accident. What was missing was an awareness of the opposition between two irreconcilable positions, that everything should change and that nothing should change; neither of which were clearly articulated on either side. Had there been a serious attempt to translate this new situation into words and action, its explosive potential would have tripled.

But the atavistic mental software of the left was still stuck 30 years in the past, repeating the same banalities, rehashing the same repertoire. Without critically rethinking the role of the unions, the usefulness of their practices and the relevance of their slogans, we fell back into apathy less than three weeks after the start of this magnificent sequence of events. There’s a lot of collective responsibility for this; unable to pull their heads out of their asses, the “revolutionary” faction continued to repeat its slogans over and over again, drooling over the riot videos and tolerating the presence of members of parliament who only sought to calm the protest in order to better exploit it. No one with any sense of these shortcomings even tried to bring them to our attention.

What this tells us about the current situation

“But especially: the exposition of a revolutionary perspective must still consist of describing and explaining what takes place day after day, and is never satisfied with the ridiculous, abstract proclamation of general goals.”

– Guy Debord, Letter to Afonso Moteiro

We must not underestimate the farmers’ capacity for struggle; they have always been apt to mobilize in spectacular fashion. Blockades with tractors, manuring town halls, releasing pigs on the freeway: nothing is totally new here, only the tempo of the mobilization. The FNSEA is being torn apart, the movement’s going on the offensive; what we’re seeing ever since the Gilets Jaunes movement, and increasingly so, is that the people know how they should talk to the state.

A certain pattern from the Gilet Jaunes playbook might seem familiar: mobilization on a scale that seems trivial to a left that is totally disconnected from this fringe of the population; slogans that demand a better quality of life on the broadest of scales, which make the rest of the population vibrate in unison; partial convergence; and a critical distance from the unions. Other sectors then begin to feel they have something in common to express; as in many recent movements, we quickly see the rest of the population feel concerned by the struggle of a single sector, as soon as it frees itself from the usual institutional and media framing. It’s this automatic shift towards something collective, this informal feeling of a collective struggle to be waged, that revolutionaries need to work on; it’s where they ought to put their pens.

What’s happening now is an attempt by politicians of all stripes to fit the protest into their own categories, and a temporary silence from the watchdogs of the State and the FNSEA, who are carefully waiting for the situation to evolve in a direction more likely to lead to decay. They’re stalling, not sleeping: as with the post-Concorde riots, their stupor will only last until they figure out how to seize on the slightest moment of weakness to roll out their rhetoric of a return to order and send in the troops to ensure it.

In the face of all this, we might fear that the revolutionaries will stick to their old habits, lining up empty ideological formulas without trying to understand how to take advantage of the situation. Despite some positive developments since 2018, we remain incapable of changing our modus operandi and even our way of understanding society and its uprisings.

Yet it is precisely the task of revolutionary activists to reflect on the current situation, to anticipate it, to give it a language, to understand its invisible motivations and its grandiose possibilities. As a press release from Action Antifasciste Paris-Banlieue rightly put it, militant enquiry is a primary means of action within everyone’s reach: communicating, investigating, gathering testimonies, delivering observations. This facilitates both overall understanding and communication with the different factions engaged in the struggle.

Against Convergence

This is neither a call for support nor an injunction to rise up. The agricultural world expects nothing from us, and we expect nothing in return.

What the Left describes as the convergence of struggles refers to an artificial coming together of distinct movements, collectives and social groups; artificial because rather than abandoning the kinds of categorical separations produced by the system, the proposed convergence simply lines them up alongside one another, ultimately reinforcing the fundamental divisions. The convergence of struggles relies on the existence of a centralized organization responsible for carrying out a programmatic synthesis of the specific interests of the separate categories: students, wage earners, farmers, agricultural workers, artisans, civil servants, etc. The old Leninist way of doing things is safe and sound: the party owns the working class, formulates its interests and dictates its conduct–the party is everything.

We have little interest in the pious hopes of convergence and the politics of recuperation they struggle to conceal. Nothing will ever emerge from a left so stuck in its ways, be they institutional or extra-parliamentary. We have no illusion of influencing the political sensibilities of anyone on the ground, no matter how many surveys are carried out. But still we refuse to remain passive spectators of the growing grievances and the prospect of the mobilization being surpassed by other sectors of the population–truck drivers and construction workers in particular. If we can’t be the movement itself, we need to be there to understand the nature and scale of what’s happening.

The Charlatan Revolutionary Group

January 2024

SOURCE:

https://territories.substack.com/p/the-left-progress-and-the-peasant

The post The Left, Progress, and the Peasant- French Farmer’s Revolt 2024 appeared first on Void Network.

We should start by looking back at the abrupt end of the movement against the “reform.”¹ After a series of demonstrations called by the unions, after a growing number of strikes which did not succeed in spreading or increasing their duration, the perspectives for struggle were increasingly reduced. Fatigue and lassitude finally took over, along with a feeling of powerlessness to change the balance of power favoring a government supported by capitalist forces and well-off sectors of society. The strikes, though involving active and determined workers, never generalized to a level capable of blocking the functioning of society. Repeated demonstrations, the energy and creativity of the demonstrators, the use of blockades and sabotage, the formation of networks of struggle collectives, the links forged between students and workers, and the sympathy of the majority of the working class—all these were not enough to sustain the dynamic and make it possible to pass to a more offensive level of struggle. Although very popular, the active movement remained the effort of a minority. The successive demonstrations only revealed to the eyes of the participants the impasse which the union forces sought increasingly to hide with triumphalist speeches, an irritating demagoguery. The movement was finally exhausted, and the activism of minorities could do nothing about it.

The clear end of the movement did not efface the collective consciousness with a profound and massive rejection of the neoliberal line of present-day capitalism and its more and more authoritarian modes of governing. This rejection did not succeed in finding its way to become a decisive force of opposition. The rejection it expressed is therefore still there, so the defeat was not experienced as the defeat of the collective and its subversive energy. The general feeling is summed up by a phrase given different emphases and nuances: “We have lost but they haven’t won. The fight will start again, sooner or later.”

This disgust with the political class and its propagandists, with the increasing repression of all forms of opposition, with general unhappiness, social impoverishment, and growing class inequality provided a context for the explosion of revolt against police violence among young people in working-class neighborhoods. This is racist violence that is a daily experience in the neighborhoods that are parking places for young people—poor and for the most part excluded from the world of work and social life in general—who, though of immigrant origin, are often “French” for one or two generations. Police violence and its racist dimension have a long history in France, with roots deep in the class conflicts marking the origin of industrial capitalism in France and the repression of successive groups of immigrants who have long composed the working class. To that must be added the consequences of a badly digested colonial heritage and the nationalist rebellions of the postwar period. More recently, police repression has returned to the forefront of social life with the movement of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), of whom more than 3,000 were wounded and mutilated by the police. Now it is extending to all forms of opposition to the social order, including struggles against the destruction of the environment. These have been systematically criminalized and confronted by the police. This was notably the case recently at Sainte-Soline, in the center-west of France, where 30,000 people, mobilized to block an agricultural-industrial project of privatizing water resources, came up against militarized police forces that produced dozens of wounded and left two young people in critical condition.

It is hard to analyze an event like the banlieue youth revolt, characterized by spontaneity and improvisation. Clearly, the spontaneity is the fruit of a pre-existing situation, and the unpredictable was obviously to be predicted. But this revolt took unexpected forms and it is difficult to see its links with earlier struggles. Karl Marx once suggested there are social revolts that are like earthquakes—it is pointless to try to predict them, and even more to dissect them or to set them in pre-established schemas and political projects constructed in advance. Nonetheless, if one is an enemy of the existing order, one cannot dissociate these events from the current crisis of society and one is inevitably led to solidarity with them, even if that solidarity is purely abstract and impossible to make concrete, even if these revolts do not open a perspective on radical social change. Perhaps they are signs of something different on the horizon. Only the future will tell and provide perspective. Meanwhile, some facts can help us understand the circumstances of the explosion.

The recent revolt of young people in working-class neighborhoods has surpassed the similar revolts of 2005² in intensity and breadth. While at that time, the rebellion went on for three weeks, this time it lasted only a few days, but involved more of the country; it reached many little provincial cities traditionally considered “calm” and not only the big urban centers. The revolt was not confined to neighborhoods outside the city proper, the suburbs, but expanded into the urban centers. As a Communist city official in the Paris region observed, “Symbolically speaking, this went far beyond what happened in 2005.”³ Indeed, the explosion of anger and rage focused above all on “symbols of the state” and in particular on the so-called forces of order, the police and the gendarmerie (military police), viewed in any case by the young of these neighborhoods as the heart of the state’s repressive control. Contrary to what the government and its propagandists want people to think, schools and civic institutions (libraries, cultural enters) were not the most commonly attacked locations—even though for many kids these places are centers of power, places that they assimilate to others where they are rejected, devalued, excluded. Among the 2,500 public buildings set on fire or damaged in more than 500 urban areas there was a high number of police stations and gendarme posts, compared to a small number of schools (168). Gun stores were pillaged here and there by people who took hunting rifles and other weapons, a new fact testifying to the increased level of violence in clashes with the authorities. Another novelty: a hundred mayor’s offices were attacked, along with elected politicians, occasionally in their private residences.

Institutions of repression and control are replacing the collapsing institutions of the welfare state. This evolution has been visible for years: the increase of repression is the counterpart to the willful and continuous dismantling of the welfare state. The realization of this fact was central to the revolt of the Gilets Jaunes and more recently to the movement against the pension “reform.” To quote Marx once again, the forms of political power tend to correspond to the forms of the capitalist exploitation of labor. The latter are increasingly violent, characterized by the precarity, fragility, and harshness of working conditions and low wages. The forces of repression are hated in the poor neighborhoods, where young people are abandoned to “uberized” jobs. They are, so to speak, a world of proletarians outside of the classical proletariat. The police, on the other hand, are always supported by the bourgeois classes (naturally), by shopkeepers, and also by workers who are afraid of losing the little they still have and who are attached to a “balanced” past, mythologized and longed for, which will not return.

The modern French state (and in this it is setting an example for Europe) is increasingly based on institutions dealing in open violence. The police have become a state within the state. Even worse, recent developments suggest that the branches of the police charged with repression on the streets somehow lost their connection with the top of the institution, with the hierarchy of command. Instead, they are very much under the control of the police unions whose links with the extreme right are by now well known. This development is producing unease even among the ruling elite, the leading liberal press, and the judiciary. The same development can be seen in other sectors of the state: for instance, everyone knows (even if it is not openly said) that the Minister of the Interior, in charge of the police, cannot be nominated without the agreement of the police unions. Similarly the Minister of Agriculture and Ecological Transition is “chosen” by the main agricultural-industrial firms, as the energy minister is “chosen” by the bosses of the nuclear industry. One could say that we are progressing towards transparency about the real nature of democracy.

There is also the question of social immiseration. The explosions of revolt brought with them a lot of looting—much more than in 2005. In many places, after the kids had broken shop windows and stolen some candies it was their mothers and grandmothers who came to stock up on noodles, sugar, flour, oil, and canned food—something that tells us a lot about the period we are entering in our supposedly affluent society. These revolts were also, in part, hunger riots.

The young people who ran free in the streets were for the majority very young, between twelve and seventeen, younger than in 2005. There were over 3,000 arrests, with more than 1,300 youths processed through expedited trials, and more than 700 individuals sentenced to serious prison terms, 8 months on average.⁴ Thus the imprisoned surplus population continues to grow. A few big-city suburbs and neighborhoods saw a momentary mix of kids in revolt and those who have been drawn for years to clashes with the police in demonstrations, the so-called black bloc. But for the most part these remained two worlds separated by ideology. I’ve heard of the reply (real or made up) of a young rebel to a black bloc member: “You get yourselves arrested because you are engaged in politics, we do it because we are young!” On the other hand, given the form of the revolt, its spontaneity and suddenness, and the places in which it broke out (streets and blocks), workers generally expressed no solidarity. Here and there the intervention of teachers or local civic or cultural workers made it possible to discuss things, to “reason with” the young people’s rage. Discussions of the event certainly took place in workplaces and among families at home, but without any particular impact. One wonders to what extend the “family” institution still exists within the world of proletarians which is decomposing or imploding. We know that the number of single-parent families continues to increase, especially those headed by single mothers, for the most part unable to pay attention to the children thanks to the struggle for daily survival: long hours of work and transportation, debilitating fatigue. Macron’s speech demanding that families “control your children,” visibly had no relation to reality.

However, in the neighborhoods where the revolts broke out, people openly expressed a clear understanding of the situation and a critique of the police. The sense that the government lies, that the police are out of control and defend the interests of the well-off, is generally shared. People reject state violence, which is seen as violence against the working classes—even if at the same time people demand more from the state. A contradiction which reveals the present level of social consciousness, far from understanding that the repressive state is the only state possible in the present period of capitalism.

Groups thinking of themselves as “radical” saw these revolts as the basis of a “revolutionary” situation, which should be developed and “politicized.” Given the circumstances, in particular the repressive force of the modern state, to incite fourteen-year-olds to pursue this path of confrontation, ignoring their weaknesses, seems irresponsible. Much wiser were the words of a woman from a neighborhood association who, because she didn’t feel like having any arguments to calm the young people down, simply advised them: “Take care, don’t put yourself in danger.” Because they really are in danger, before and during the revolt. It is already a lot to take seriously the reasons for their anger.

Practically all the discourse of the old left, in contrast, demonstrates incomprehension of the events, a denial of the condition of this abandoned youth who “is angry at everyone, at the whole world,” as someone said. It is true that rage against the world does not necessarily lead to the idea that another world is possible. And there is a big difference from the social movement that preceded it, where this idea was present even if it could not be realized. The fact is that a social explosion without results or immediate perspectives is disturbing. Thus the renowned thinker Edgar Morin (one of the last nonconformist left intellectuals) who wrote about the events without touching on the material conditions—the daily violence—that provoked them invoked jihadism to suggest a nihilist quality. It’s an easy and perverse move to make, since the great majority of the young people involved are of immigrant origin: “Unlike the jihadists motivated by hatred for unbelievers, we see here the opposite of faith, a sort of nihilism. Beyond rage at the death of Nahel M. it seems that the intoxication of smashing everything and setting fires was lived as a dark festival by those who carried it out.”⁵ The threatening image of the (twelve to seventeen-year-old !?) “barbarian” thus discreetly replaced the figure of the “jihadist,” a discursive development that deserves some discussion. In any case, Morin concluded that “the events can be read in two different ways: as revealing the deep evil that is eating way at our society, or as an attack of adolescent madness, collective and transitory.” The “profound evil of our society” seems the correct reading to me.

To conclude, with a few notes on the attitude of political and union forces: Here things are at the moment somewhat confused. The near totality of political forces in France defend the liberal principles of capitalism. Only the new party France Insoumise takes a position against this orientation, with the weak support of several marginal Socialists (the majority have signed on to Macron’s neoliberal project) and the Greens, themselves divided between “realists” and “radicals.” In contrast, the decaying Communist Party, currently run by a neo-Stalinist clan, patriotic and productivist, holds demagogic ideas about “order” and the police, regarded as “order workers.” The political class as a whole is engaged in a ferocious struggle to put France Insoumise , now the principal enemy of the liberal consensus, beyond the pale. For the time being, this party has been behaving in a rather dignified way within bourgeois politics: it has defended the young arrestees and demanded a “democratic reconstruction” (?) of the police. That it asked angry young people not to destroy social goods (schools, social centers, libraries, health centers, public transportation) without mentioning the attacks on the police and their buildings has been very badly taken by other political organizations. This might explain, in part thanks to electoralist demagoguery, why they are far from power. What would they do if they were in the government? There is also the fact that this new party is composed of people coming from civil society, militants involved in the recent struggles, neighborhood activists. It is a party motivated by the strong feeling of social conflict that has been at work in France for years. However, even given young people’s disgust for politics, it is likely that this attitude will be rewarded in the next elections. The unions have also been prudent in their reactions. The biggest ones (CFDT, CGT) and the more combative one (SUD) did not condemn the youth; they timidly tried to establish links with their revolt and the general social situation.

A bit of sociological information gives us something to think about: comparing the locations of these revolts with those of demonstrations against the pension “reform” shows an overlap, particularly in the small provincial cities. We can at the very least conclude that the atmosphere of social revolt currently deep-rooted in French society has reached the young people excluded from it. Their need to fight against social injustice, against injustice in general, is an idea whose time has come. Like the recognition that the government lies and that we can’t expect it to improve the situation of the weakest members of society. We should not forget that the recent struggles of the Gilets Jaunes and their insurrectionary spirit remain alive. Everything is there: everything is present, in the memory of the moment.

We have to see what comes next, for better and for worse. The general situation will not be stabilized, austerity will increasingly affect the working classes, the exclusion of the young will continue and even be more severe. The forms of political representation will continue to discredit themselves, parliamentary democracy will take more authoritarian forms. Other events, movements, struggles will come. History goes on.

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Written by Charles Reeve

Source: Brooklyn Rail

1. See Charles Reeve, “Letter from Paris”, https://brooklynrail.org/2023/04/field-notes/Letter-From-Paris-1
2. In 2005 revolts in French banlieues broke out on October 27 in response to the deaths of two adolescents, electrocuted within a power installation while attempting to escape a police patrol.
3. The mayor of Grigny, L’Humanité, June 30, 2023.
4. Figures from the Ministry of the Interior, July 5, 2023.
5. Edgar Morin, “La crise française doit être située dans la complexité d’une polycrise mondiale,” Le Monde, July 29 2023.

The post France: A Movement Ends, An Explosion of Rage appeared first on Void Network.

Last Tuesday evening, Mahsa (Zina) Amini, a 22-year-old ethnic Kurd from the western city of Saqez in the Kurdistan province, was detained outside a metro station in Tehran by Iran’s notorious morality police.

Mahsa Amini was travelling with her family from Iran’s western province of Kurdistan to the capital, Tehran, to visit relatives when she was reportedly arrested for failing to meet the country’s strict rules on women’s dress, ie, not wearing the hijab and her trousers “correctly” and was brutally beaten in a police van, according to witnesses.

The news comes weeks after Iran’s hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, called for stricter enforcement of the country’s mandatory dress code, which has required all women to wear the hijab head-covering.

According to Hrana, an Iranian human rights organisation, Amini’s family were told during her arrest that she would be released after a “re-education session”. But Amini was in a coma her family said, adding that they were told by hospital staff that she was brain dead.

She was accused of improperly wearing her hijab in a country which strictly enforces the compulsory covering of women’s hair and bodies. According to witnesses, she was beaten while inside a police van that took her to a detention center. Amini died on Friday in the hospital after spending three days in a coma. 

Police in Tehran immediately denied responsibility for her murder and said she suffered “sudden heart failure” while waiting with other women at the facility to be “educated.” Amini’s arrest and death rapidly set off protests across the country, initially starting outside the hospital where she died and spreading to other provinces. Throughout social media, she has already become a symbol for the struggle against the compulsory hijab and police across the world. 

While Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi called Amini’s family to express his condolences, he’s mostly dealt with the crisis — one of the biggest of his first year in office so far — by brutally repressing the Iranians who have taken to the streets. The repression has particularly targeted the Kurdish regions that have gone on general strike in protest against the killing of Mahsa. At least 10 major cities have been shut down since Monday despite intense police repression. 

Hundreds of brave Kurdish women protesting the mandatory hijab took off their scarves during Amini’s funeral and waved it in the air while chanting slogans in Kurdish and Farsi: “Death to the dictator!”; “Killing for the scarf, how long will it be?”; and “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Security forces later shot some of the protesters and attacked many with tear gas, injuring at least 30. 

Elsewhere in Iran, security forces have cut off internet access and attacked and arrested protestors, beating people indiscriminately in the streets and targeting activists in the women’s movement. Like in previous struggles, the student movement has been at the forefront of organizing mobilizations, with major protests breaking out in campuses across the country despite the presence of repressive forces and potentially severe consequences for students.

In a joint statement, fourteen student organizations from schools including Amirkabir University, Tarbiat Modares University, and Allameh Tabataba’i University called for a “dissolution of the Guidance Patrol and Morality Police as one of the most important institutions of repression post-revolution” in Iran. 

The protests have not only led to a deeper questioning of the police, but also a deeper questioning of the regime among broader sectors of society. At protests, demonstrators are using anti-regime slogans such as “Death to Khamenei!” referring to regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Other slogans included “Death to the dictator!” and “No fear! We’re all together!” Importantly, some protesters are condemning the brutal authoritarian rule of both the U.S.-backed Shah’s regime, which lasted from 1941 until the 1979 revolution, and the current Islamic regime against the monarchist perspective of some Iranians who advocate for a return to Iran’s monarchy through the son of the late Shah. 

The Iranian diaspora, which is estimated to include at least six million Iranians around the world, has also been active in organizing protests against Amini’s atrocious murders, particularly in Europe, Toronto, and New York. 

Iran’s Deepening Fault Lines 

Mahsa Amini’s shocking murder and resulting social unrest are creating a difficult political backdrop for Raisi who is set to speak at the UN general assembly in New York on Wednesday. 

Beyond quelling the popular discontent, Raisi faces an erosion of legitimacy of Iran’s regime which has strong theocratic features. This political crisis is also marked by a widening of the rift between the two wings that have come to dominate Iranian politics: the “reformists” and the more conservative “hardliners.” Thus far, pro-reform figures like former President Mohammad Khatami have questioned the regime’s response to Amini’s death. Former lawmaker Ali Motahari also wrote that he feared that the incident could portray the Iranian government internationally as an entity like the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

Other reformists have gone further to release statements against mandatory hijab and the morality police. Reformist lawmaker Parvaneh Salahshouri, the leader of the Women’s Faction in Parliament, wrote against the compulsory hijab in 2018 and, as recently as August 2, 21 prominent reformists had also denounced mandatory hijab laws. 

Recent reports on the frail and ailing health of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have also opened up questions about political uncertainty and even deeper factional divisions, as Khamenei’s death would open up a power struggle over his successor. 

The deepening crisis of the Iranian regime cannot be seen outside of the dissolution of the Iranian nuclear deal, which had provided temporary relief from some sanctions — a strategic aim of both wings of the regime. The imposition of Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions, which Biden is continuing, have plunged the country into an unprecedented economic crisis, primarily affecting the workers and poorest sectors of Iranian society, who expressed their rage at the economic situation during two important waves of class struggle in 2018 and 2019. 

Since then, the regime has responded to the unstable situation by expressing its more bonapartist features and relying heavily on its repressive apparatus to crackdown on any discontent. In addition to the increased repression, last year’s presidential elections underscored the undemocratic aspects of the Iranian “republic” in which the 12-person Guardian Council responsible for approving candidates for elections essentially blocked the nomination of anyone who can possibly challenge Raisi as a way to effectively secure the election of the hardliner.

These tendencies toward bonapartism are undoubtedly linked to the growing political influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a powerful security force and internal police which by some measures controls two thirds of Iran’s GDP and is increasingly competing with the clergy for power. Their historic role can be traced back to helping to consolidate the Islamic regime during the Iranian counterrevolution and the functioning of the IRGC expanded greatly in the political crisis set off by the aftermath of the 2009 elections which they played an important role in suppressing. 

In recent months, the increased persecution of prominent political activists in Iran, especially women like Leila Hosseinzadeh and Sepideh Rashno, has put a spotlight on the rigid discipline of the reactionary regime which beyond the oppression of women (Iran is one of the world’s top executioners of women) and the brutal punishment of the queer community as the recent death sentences of queer activists, Zahra Seddiqi Hamedani and Elham Choubdar show, also extends to the denial of basic democratic rights like the recognition of independent trade unions. 

Developing Tendencies toward Crisis and Class Struggle 

Since the beginning of 2022, the social atmosphere in the country has also been marked by  waves of protests and strikes, mostly targeting water shortages and the growing cost of living crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. As Red Flag recently reported, the Iranian economy is facing a serious crisis: 

The currency hit its lowest value ever in June and annual inflation is sitting at 41.5 percent and climbing, according to figures from the Statistical Center of Iran. The price of essential foodstuffs has increased by 90.2 percent, and household expenditures have tripled, while real wages continue to decline.

The effects of crippling maximum pressure sanctions, coupled with the seemingly comatose nuclear deal, has led the regime to impose austerity as a way to make workers pay for the crisis that is crushing them. Already, Raisi has introduced a slew measures like cuts to wheat subsidies and an elimination of pharmaceutical subsidies. As a result, there has been a thirteen-fold increase in the price of bread, and bread riots quickly emerged in the southern province of Khuzestan, which is home to a large Arab minority and a frequent flashpoint of struggle due to environmental problems in the region and the presence of the militant sugarcane workers of the Haft Tappeh union. 

Within the workers’ movement, teachers have also led struggles related to the cost-of-living crisis and have spearheaded a series of nationwide strikes, rallies and occupations, including huge demonstrations across the country on May Day this past year as part of the Coordinating Council of Teachers’ Trade Unions. On a political scale, new Marxist organizations (largely operating underground) like the “Labour Organised Action Committee” (LOAC) are emerging among the student and workers’ movements as revolutionary socialist ideas re-emerge among the Iranian vanguard which has been involved in the recent waves of struggles from the mass uprising in 2019 to the oil workers’ strike in 2021. 

From Fury to Freedom 

The social explosions emerging in Iran have the potential to build threads of continuity with the historic struggle of the Iranian masses against their oppressive regimes and the threat of imperialism. In order for the mobilizations that are emerging against women’s oppression to advance in a way that responds to the interests of the oppressed and exploited in Iran, it’s important to tie the struggle against Iran’s particularly undemocratic and patriarchal regime with a struggle against the capitalist system that sustains the bourgeois mullahs. 

In that sense, the convergence of the burgeoning women’s movement with Iran’s combative working class that has emerged as an important actor in recent struggles can play an important role in pushing these struggles forward. Let us not forget that the Iranian revolution was set off by the Shah’s violent suppression of protests and authoritarian rule. It was the oil workers’ strike in response to this repression that set off a general strike that brought the Shah’s regime to its knees. The oil workers in Iran today have the potential to wield their strategic power in a similar way.

And the Iranian revolution was not only a revolution against the Shah’s regime but a revolution against the imperialist forces that benefited from his rule. These lessons are important today, as imperialist countries like the U.S. and France denounce the murder of Mahsa Amini as a way to conceal their own interests. These are the so-called “democratic” countries whose police also brutally murder women, whose regimes deny the right to abortion, and impose racist hijab bans limiting a woman’s autonomy from another angle. These are the countries that impose maximum pressure sanctions that inflict suffering on Iranian workers everyday. 

Against the Iranian ruling class and foriegn powers, the involvement of the left can be decisive in fighting back independently against these oppressive attacks. After all, it was Marxist women who organized the first massive protests against compulsory veiling during International Women’s Day in 1979. 

The international Left and feminist movements around the world should also take up the banner of the Iranian women, youth, and workers in struggle, in the spirit of the George Floyd protests which spread globally. The problems we face as a class go beyond our borders and can only be resolved internationally.

_________

Source: https://www.leftvoice.org/say-her-name-protests-erupt-across-iran-after-police-murder-of-mahsa-amini/

written by

Maryam Alaniz

Maryam Alaniz is a socialist journalist, activist, and PhD student living in NYC. She is an editor for the international section of Left Voice. Follow her on Twitter: @MaryamAlaniz

The post Iran on Flames after Morality Police murder of Mahsa Amini- Videos and Reports appeared first on Void Network.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________

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

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

Preface 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Emilio Janequeo, Santiago de Chile, April 2022

October 18 [1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolt^[4]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images: Tomas Munita

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______

SOURCE: IllWill

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

As the omicron variant sweeps through American communities, many of our workplaces and institutions are grinding to a halt. With nurses, teachers and other essential workers getting ill or quarantining, we are facing disruptions at schools and in hospitals. Some employers are seeking stopgap measures, trying to hire rapidly to fill open jobs, begging for community volunteers to help keep things running and even lowering requirements for substitute teachers to get people into school buildings.

Can this be a moment for workers to demand more from shorthanded employers, whether that be higher pay, more remote work options, hazard bonuses or needed personal protective equipment to lower health risks? And how can gains gleaned in this moment be retained and even surpassed in a post-pandemic future?

Past labor shortages caused by extraordinary circumstances in other places may offer lessons. For example, in the aftermath of World War I and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, a labor shortage and strike movement in France created conditions for envisioning transformative change. French workers seized the opportunity to pressure employers as well as the state, ultimately succeeding in changing that nation’s labor code and inspiring a growing youth rebellion against work — led by a group of young veterans who called themselves “Surrealists” — that would aim at even more radical changes.

During World War I, France faced a labor shortage because of the mass mobilization of soldiers and the steep military and civilian death toll of the war. With a dearth of workers, France recruited and, in some cases, conscripted immigrant workers from the French colonies of Algeria and Morocco, Spain and elsewhere, who labored to support the war economy. But the onset of the influenza pandemic in 1918 exacerbated the labor shortage because of several conditions, including the large number of maimed veterans unable to work after the war, a low birthrate and the massive pandemic death toll.

To mitigate the labor shortfall and regulate wages, the French government accelerated the supervised immigration of mostly male workers from its empire and other nations, and, in some cases, it re-incentivized work for French women, even amid fears about declining natality.

Despite these efforts to reduce the labor shortage and keep wages artificially low during a period of rapidly rising postwar inflation, the shortfall of workers persisted. Perceiving an opportunity to gain leverage, workers organized and fought for a shorter workday and higher wages.

In a concentrated period between 1917 and 1920, French citizens ignited a protest movement in which millions of workers across sectors participated in organized and wildcat strikes, sabotage actions, walkouts, slowdowns and absenteeism.

As a result, the French labor force soon succeeded in winning a major demand: the enactment of the eight-hour workday by Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau in 1919. By comparison, it took the United States two more decades to institutionalize the eight-hour day and five-day workweek, with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1940.

However, not all French workers were satisfied. Many employers refused to comply with the new eight-hour law, and as pandemic conditions waned and the labor shortage eased slightly in the mid-1920s, dissatisfaction remained palpable. Workers wanted higher wages (there was no legal minimum wage yet), the “English week” (Saturdays off, the precursor to the “weekend”) and improved conditions. Their struggle came to a head in 1936, when nationwide strikes resulted in the Matignon Agreements, which implemented significant wage increases, the 40-hour workweek and the country’s first paid holidays.

But some people had a radically different vision. In 1924, a group of young artists, writers and intellectuals, many of whom were veterans of the war, formed a cultural movement in Paris called “Surrealism,” soon declaring a “war on work” meant to battle wage-labor exploitation and what they viewed as the cult of the work ethic. In 1925, they emblazoned the cover of their journal “Surrealist Revolution” with a declaration of collective work refusal. In 1929, one member, André Thirion, penned “Down with Work!,” a powerful manifesto that echoed the 19th-century utopian socialist Charles Fourier in its demand for the essential human right to “refuse work” whenever desired.

Workers were badly needed in France’s postwar reconstruction, but the French Surrealists, most of whom were white men with some college education or professional training, attempted to abstain from further participation in what they saw as a corrupt system for workers across race and class sectors.

Disgusted by the nationalistic belligerence of wartime France that had resulted in mass death, they rallied behind the idea of a “big quit” — a radical refusal to participate in the French economy. Yet, instead of the temporary solution of voluntary unemployment, in which the worker bides time until finding a better job or higher wages, Surrealists proposed something more extreme: permanent strike.

The notion of permanent strike, or lifelong withdrawal from the workforce, meant a lifestyle of precarious labor, or what is known today as “gig work.” Their radical and utopian demand pushed up against the limits of the practical. Most Surrealists could not afford to live without earning income. Nevertheless, many deserted careers and, on principle, worked barely enough to survive. Whenever possible, Surrealists attempted to resist the allure of consumerism, believing that excessive consumption was the flip side of capitalism’s drive toward production.

For the Surrealists, the system of wage labor was historically linked to the violence of nationalism and imperialism. In 1925, they proclaimed, “We do not accept the laws of economy or exchange, we do not accept the slavery of work, and on an even wider scale we proclaim ourselves in revolt against history.”

The Surrealist goal of the permanent strike was not to pressure the boss, nor to instigate reforms, but to undermine the foundations of the capitalist nation-state altogether. This extreme position presaged (and, in some cases, influenced) the broader work refusal that characterized various youth and activist countercultures going forward in the 20th and 21st centuries — including beatniks, hippies, gutter punks, purportedly “lazy” millennials, today’s anti-work advocates and the current “lying flat” movement in China. If certain anti-work countercultures are primarily pursuing, in the words of 19th-century communist writer Paul Lafargue, “The Right to be Lazy,” the Surrealists were wage labor abolitionists who sought a utopian post-work system.

Today’s labor market differs from that of post-World War I France in almost every imaginable way, and the ongoing pandemic is playing a distinct role right now. Nevertheless, a comparison of our workforce shortages with those of a century ago is telling. The “Great Resignation” of 2021 has been likened to an “unofficial general strike.” For workers, at least, such frictional unemployment and aspirational job switching can be a good thing. Taking stock of the 1917-1920 French labor crisis and the Surrealist “war on work” provides a provocative example of how organized workers can escalate their advantage and bolster their morale during and after a shortage — and how oppositional countercultures can imagine a totally different future for workers.

______

Abigail Susik, who wrote this piece for the Washington Post, is an associate professor of art history at Willamette University and author of “Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work.”

source: https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/

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