“The Capitol insurrection and the 1898 Wilmington coup share key similarities. They both divided our citizenry between those wanting to guarantee rights for a broader cross section of individuals versus those wanting to restrict them to a privileged few. Both events were also orchestrated from the top down in an attempt to place party above country and to delegitimize our election process. And finally, both instances were perpetuating a so-called Lost Cause.”
Category Archives: governance
Johnisha Levi: “A Tale of Two Insurrections”
Posted in governance, justice, law, Nota Bene, revolt, rights, violence
Tagged insurrection
Robert Solé: “Ten Years of Hope and Blood”
“But in Lebanon, as in Algeria or Sudan, the game is not over. The same can be said of all the countries that have experienced a “Spring”, however fleeting, followed by a counter-revolution. The Arab peoples now know that it is not enough to overthrow an authoritarian regime to achieve democracy. Elsewhere in the world, the road has always been long and painful. Refusing to despair, the most committed or lucid citizens are trying, in Gramsci’s words, to combine the pessimism of intelligence with the optimism of will.”
Posted in defeat, democracy, freedom, governance, melancholy, Nota Bene, revolution, tragic politics
Tagged Arab Spring
Christine Adams: “4 Cautionary Tales from the French Revolution for Today”
“The unsettled era of the French Revolution (1789–1799) offers insight to our current historical moment as the former U.S. president still refuses to accept recent election results as legitimate, firing up an already potent and dangerous White nationalist movement that feeds on social media-fueled fever dreams.”
Posted in crisis, governance, Nota Bene, revolution
Tagged French Revolution, insurrection
Luam Kidane: “Provocations to rupture and the power to act”
“Movements made up of cultural producers and trade unionists, farmers and feminists are calling us to action through the work that they do. Mutual aid initiatives, land occupations and people’s assemblies are setting an example of how movement building practices can help us to break out of the marginalizing and oppressive confines imposed by the neoliberal system.”
Posted in emergency, founding, freedom, gender, governance, justice, Nota Bene, resistance, rights
Tagged movements
Amador Fernández Savater: “Like lost children”
‘Thus, like lost children, we feel our way towards the revolutions of the 21st century. Without ever dissociating again what is wanted and how it is wanted, as in the old question of what to do, where the end justified the most aberrant means, but rather accepting that the means already prefigure the ends or that there are only means, means without ends, “pure means”.’
Posted in autonomy, disengagement, ethics, governance, Nota Bene, revolution
“One year on, Iraq’s revolutionary spirit is still alive”
“On the anniversary of the 2019 October Revolution, Iraqi protesters show a renewed determination to create their own history and shape their own future.”
Posted in emergency, governance, In The News, power
Tagged Iraq
Amanda C. Waterhouse: ‘“La Esperanza de América Latina”: The Ongoing Student Revolution in Colombia’
“Continued student organizing shows that student protest is not an add-on to normal political life in Colombia, but a pillar so fundamental that it persists even when the most basic rights erode. Students have long agitated amidst extreme adversity and violence. They have … defended their participation in co-governance within educational institutions, especially universities, and addressed the broader political, economic, and social problems of the country.”
Posted in emergency, freedom, governance, In The News, resistance
Tagged Colombia, universities
“Hopes Fade for New Political Course in Algeria a Year After Popular Uprising”
“The revolt in the streets that began last year, known here as Hirak, initially appeared to signal a new dawn in a country that had been stifled for decades by its huge military. But when the movement’s failure to coalesce around leaders and agree on goals created a vacuum, the remnants of the repressive Algerian state, with its ample security services, stepped in.”
Posted in democracy, governance, In The News, power, revolt, rights, the common, tragic politics
Tagged Algeria
Daniel Gutiérrez: “Seizing the Times: Five Theses on Militant Development”
“We are confronted by a moment of impossible historical importance where the decisions we make, and the possibilities we seize or do not seize, will define the shape of what all our tomorrows look like. This moment has been produced by the overlapping crises of neoliberalism, social reproduction, climate catastrophe, and the coronavirus pandemic that have articulated and fused into a combined crisis of unfathomable proportions. So long as this objective crisis remains unresolved, a revolutionary opportunity is presented to us, but we must organize ourselves into a subjective force capable of seizing it.”
Posted in crisis, governance, justice, Nota Bene, power, revolt, the common, the Left
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin interviewed on “Ungovernable”
“We as activists, as organizers, have to make ourselves and our communities ungovernable. I know you’ve heard that term before. That means what it says. We have to make it so that we create a new kind of political system of our own, whether it’s dual power or revolutionary direct democracy, whatever we want to call it in this period. We need to create that kind of movement, a mass anti-fascist movement on one hand. And on the other hand, we need to have the capacity on a mass scale to build a community-based mass economic survival tendency, based on cooperatives in the ghetto for housing the poor, rebuilding the cities, and taking care of the material needs of the poor.”
Posted in anarchism, autonomy, founding, freedom, governance, Nota Bene, revolution
