Category Archives: anarchism

Davide Turcato: “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885-1915”

Posted on June 8, 2018 by

“Transnationalism was thus a key feature of the anarchist movement, which significantly contributed to its sustainability. In times of repression, Italian anarchism abroad provided continuity to the movement that had been beheaded in the homeland, and its press abroad took up the task of carrying on propaganda in the Italian language. However, transnationalism was not just an emergency mode of operation in exceptional times. Rather, it was a built-in characteristic of the movement, closely related to the nature of anarchist tactics. Italian anarchists were fully aware of the role of transnationalism and intentionally relied on it”

Posted in anarchism, fraternity, freedom, Nota Bene, revolution, the common

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Andy Merrifield: ‘“Fulfillment was already there”: Debord & ’68’

Posted on May 18, 2018 by

“France seemed on the precipice of revolution; a festival of people was glimpsed. Alienation was cast off, momentarily; freedom was real; capitalised time abandoned. Without trains, cars, Metro and work, leisure time was reclaimed, time lived. Students and workers seized the contingent situation, acted spontaneously, created new situations, realising something what no trade union or party could ever do, or wanted to do. And yet, as quickly as things erupted, they were almost as speedily repressed, by state and bourgeoisie, soon backed by the Communists and the CGT. The optimistic promise, the beach beneath the paving stones, had dissipated, for now. The music was over. There was no other side to break on through to.”

Posted in anarchism, crisis, defeat, emergency, Nota Bene, revolution

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Emily Cataneo: “Give Me Liberty or Something Else”

Posted on May 18, 2018 by

“The prickly problem of a New England secessionist utopia“

Posted in anarchism, autonomy, disengagement, freedom, governance, Nota Bene, rights

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David Broder: “Historically Compromised”

Posted on May 9, 2018 by

‘The Red Brigades who took Moro hostage sought to prevent a reformist solution to Italy’s institutional impasse. Their actions, or at least the anticommunist blowback it produced, did help block the PCI’s path toward power. But while they thought that this would radicalize the Italian political landscape, they were sorely mistaken. The violence of these years ultimately expressed the decline of the extra-parliamentary left. … Moro’s death was the swansong of the postwar “First Republic,” marking the failed reform of the Christian Democratic order. This brought not renewal, but protracted decline and fragmentation. The debris continues to litter the present, in an Italian political system devoid not just of credibility, but of hope.’

Posted in anarchism, crisis, defeat, Nota Bene, revolt, the Left, tragic politics, violence

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Daniel Cohn-Bendit & Claus Leggewie: “1968: Power to the Imagination”

Posted on April 26, 2018 by

“Our solidarity with the national liberation movements was immense. … What we largely ignored, however, was the suppression proceeding from the liberators themselves, once they had seized power.”

Posted in anarchism, Arendt, crisis, freedom, Nota Bene, revolution, the Left, tragic politics

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Mitchell Abidor: “1968: When the Communist Party Stopped a French Revolution “

Posted on April 20, 2018 by

“1968 was the definitive proof, if such proof were still needed, that the Communist Party had no interest in seizing power through revolution. But it also demonstrated that in this, the PCF was the perfect image of the class it represented, and vice versa. Cornelius Castoriadis … wrote in an essay published during the events:

In France in May ’68 the industrial proletariat was not the revolutionary vanguard of society, but rather its ponderous rear guard. If the student movement attacked the heavens, what stuck society to earth… was the attitude of the proletariat, its passivity in regard to its leadership and the regime, its inertia, its indifference to everything that was not an economic demand.”

Posted in anarchism, Castoriadis, defeat, Nota Bene, revolution, the Left

Chiara Bottici: “Anarchafeminism: Towards an ontology of the transindividual”

Posted on March 26, 2018 by

“At the beginning was movement: anarchism does not mean absence of order, but rather searching for a social order without an orderer.”

Posted in anarchism, gender, Nota Bene, power, resistance

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Owen Holland: “‘What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents’: The Paris Commune and the Poetics of Martyrdom in the Fin de Siècle Socialist Print Culture”

Posted on March 16, 2018 by

“The problem of how to relate to, and retrospectively valorise, the Commune’s failure created a tension in the socialist periodical press between the motivational need to celebrate such a heroic defeat, in order to justify sacrifices both past and present, and the evaluative need critically to assess the reasons that underlay the defeat.”

Posted in anarchism, defeat, melancholy, Nota Bene, poetry, revolution

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Yavor Tarinski: “City, Municipality, Commons: Rebel Cities in the Neoliberal Age”

Posted on March 2, 2018 by

“Concepts like libertarian municipalism, which are essentially direct-democratic, could be of great use in our efforts at regaining our right to the city. I.e. notions that are rooted in the historic clash over power between the municipality and the nation state. Unlike statecraft, predisposed to bureaucratic centralization and hierarchy, cities tend to empower local populaces, creating citizens, actively involved in public affairs.”

Posted in anarchism, autonomy, democracy, governance, Nota Bene, power, the common

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Andrew Culp interviewed “On Giving up on this World”

Posted on March 1, 2018 by

‘What might it mean, Culp asks, to “give up on all the reasons given for saving this world?” In response, this interview explores the pathways offered by a “dark” Deleuze, a politics of cruelty, Afro-Pessimism, partisan knowledges, destituent power, and tactics of escape.’

Posted in anarchism, Deleuze, disengagement, melancholy, Nota Bene, revolt, tragic politics