“For a few brief weeks in France [in 1968], not just a government but an entire system was called into question.”
Posted in defeat, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolt, the Left, tragic politics
‘There was much more to the First Intifada than mass protests. A less visible constellation of community organizations and networks made the uprising possible and, through a combination of grassroots democracy and what we would now call the “solidarity economy,” sustained the movement over years. This strong organizational bedrock stands out among popular movements, and is worth revisiting at a time where radical organizers from Barcelona to Kurdistanto Jackson, Miss., are taking up a similar strategy.’
Posted in autonomy, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolution, rights, tyranny, violence
Tagged Palestinians
“The revolutionary zeal to reform all aspects of society burned so intensely that it altered the very names of the days and months. As part of a project of rationalization and dechristianization, the new calendar marked the establishment of the first French Republic in 1792, the first year of the new order.”
Posted in founding, governance, Nota Bene, revolution
Tagged French Revolution
“The prickly problem of a New England secessionist utopia“
Posted in anarchism, autonomy, disengagement, freedom, governance, Nota Bene, rights
Tagged secession
“The Kurdish movement challenges the state at a conceptual level before the historical: the notion of the state appears here in relation to a way of organising the institutions rather than to the very existence of the institutions; it’s above all a way of thinking of its function.”
“In the manufactured politics of crisis that we see increasingly in many societies around the world, the question of what politics can overcome the impasse of so-called democratic rule, which serves as a cover for the domination of liberal oligarchies, has become urgent. Mining the most radical elements in Foucault’s thinking about governmentality, this essay seeks to imagine a politics of left governmentality that would evade the pitfalls of left populism.”
‘Dunn offers a categorization of revolution as a distinctly bounded historical phenomenon that has not persisted into the twenty-first century. “The Epoch of Revolution,” he argues, begins with 1789 and had definitively ended by 1989. After the Epoch of Revolution, Dunn argues, we now confront a more enduring and generic phenomenon: regime collapse.’
Posted in democracy, freedom, governance, Nota Bene, revolution
“Why we should continue talking about revolution in Syria – Isn’t it an old flame that went out? Which forms of struggle and organization evidence the continuity of revolutionary subjects? Could you elaborate on the self-governing local councils across Syria?”
Posted in autonomy, freedom, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolution, violence
“The revolutionary, many Nicaraguans say, is suddenly facing a revolution of his own.”
Posted in crisis, democracy, governance, In The News, revolution, tragic politics, violence
Tagged Nicaragua
“Until recently, many political scientists believed that there was a certain set of countries in which democracy was safe. … The recent election in Hungary is the latest piece of evidence that this theory has always been dangerously naïve.”
Posted in democracy, governance, In The News, tragic politics
Tagged Hungary
