Sahar Delijani: “Watching From a Distance As Women Fight for Freedom in Iran”

Posted on January 27, 2023 by

“There is a revolution in the making, and you must rush to make impressions of its traces, its familiar faces. You must learn to listen to its heartbeat, memorize it, keep it safe. For, this is for you too. This struggle. It encompasses your life, your freedom, your beliefs, your dreams of a better world. There is nothing abstract about it, nothing apart.”

Posted in freedom, gender, justice, Nota Bene, revolution, rights

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Alain Badiou: “Thirteen theses and some comments on politics today”

Posted on January 25, 2023 by

“We could thus define the maximum ambition of future political work: to realise for the first time in history the first hypothesis, so that revolution will prevent war, rather than the second, i.e. that war will provoke revolution.”

Posted in crisis, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolution, the Left

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David Palumbo-Liu: “Rise Up in Anger and Hope: How Eruptive Protests Can Propel Urgent Issues to the Center of Political Debate”

Posted on January 25, 2023 by

“When politicians and governments are held accountable for defaulting on their promises to support democracy and to practice it, the streets become a place where unofficial, yet highly visible plebiscites can take place.”

Posted in disobedience, emergency, freedom, Nota Bene, resistance, rights

Deion Scott Hawkins: “Not all insurrections are equal – for enslaved Americans, it was the only option.”

Posted on January 5, 2023 by

“In my view, rebellions of the enslaved can aptly be classified as insurrections.  From the early 1600s, historians estimate that there were around 250 insurrections in America that involved 10 or more enslaved people using violence to fight for equal rights.”

Posted in freedom, justice, Nota Bene, revolt, rights, tyranny

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Carolyn Eichner: “Women at the barricades”

Posted on January 5, 2023 by

“The Paris Commune exploded onto the world stage. At the intersection of political developments, resistance movements, emerging liberatory ideologies and community-based organisations, the Commune resulted from the political will of a wide range of actors to embrace the revolutionary opportunity, and put hopes and ideas into action. They drew not only on their prior liberatory plans and resistant experiences, but also on Paris’s revolutionary legacy – a potent set of available memories embraced by socialists and feminists of many stripes. This combination of history, ideology, opportunity, lived experience and hope facilitated a radically democratic urban experiment.”

Posted in anarchism, defeat, gender, Nota Bene, revolution, the common

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“In a Hospital Ward, the Wounds of a Failed Democracy Don’t Heal”

Posted on January 4, 2023 by

“Tunisia’s road to democracy began with a self-immolation, and such cases have filled hospital burn wards ever since, as elected leaders failed to deliver on a promise of prosperity.”

Posted in In The News, power, revolution, rights, the common, tragic politics

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Casey Harison: “The Crowd in History and the January 6, 2021 Attack on the US Capitol”

Posted on January 2, 2023 by

“Indeed, for those familiar with the history of crowds, January 6 has real similarities with a pattern of collective action that happened across the Atlantic World dating from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

Posted in crisis, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolt, violence

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Ethan Oversby & Benjamin Maiangwa: “Thomas Sankara, Intersectionality and the Fate of Africa’s Liberation”

Posted on January 2, 2023 by

‘Thomas Sankara is relevant today as a Marxist revolutionary, and a martyr to those inspired by his subaltern resistance to what bell hooks calls the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”; an “interlocking system of domination” that exist between the west and the rest of the world. Sankara’s legacy is particularly felt among the younger generation in Africa and elsewhere who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with exploitative capitalism, the kleptocracy of their leaders and other planetary crises.’

Posted in freedom, Nota Bene, power, revolution, rights, violence

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introduction to “Smash The System! Punk Anarchism as a Culture of Resistance” (2022)

Posted on December 15, 2022 by

“Our subculture will be Dionysian—sensual, spontaneous, wild—an uncontrollable geyser of raw feeling. The Apollonian (the rational, the intentional, the orderly) will follow the chaotic energy that drives this movement, not precede it. Intellectual proposals can build on adrenaline, lust, violence, and pleasure, but they can’t substitute for them.  So nothing sanctimonious, nothing triumphalist or moralistic. Better a gritty romanticism that sees dignity in defeat as well as victory.”

Posted in anarchism, autonomy, disobedience, fraternity, freedom, music, Nota Bene, performance, power, revolt

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David Waldstreicher reviews “The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism” by Gerald Horne

Posted on December 10, 2022 by

“Horne doesn’t deny the Revolution and the Civil War mattered. He rather brings out their counter-revolutionary dimensions and remembers neglected episodes that may have been just as or more important in, for example, Texas. Though he doesn’t explicitly say so, his Gulf South–oriented U.S. history is a rejoinder to several varieties of north-south or east-west ways of looking at our past. Instead of Texas exceptionalism, it’s America as Texas.”

Posted in founding, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolution, rights

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