J.K. Gibson-Graham
April 2006

It seems that the making of a new revolutionary imaginary is underway. Coming into being over the past few decades and into visibility and self-awareness through the Internet, independent media and most recently the World Social Forums, this emergent imaginary confounds the time-worn oppositions between global and local, revolution and reform, opposition and experiment, institutional and individual transformation. It is not that these paired evaluative terms are no longer useful but that they now refer to processes that inevitably overlap and intertwine.
We glimpse the broad outlines of this new imaginary in the performative self-designations of the “movement of movements”—We Are Everywhere, Other Economies are Possible, One No, Many Yeses, Life After Capitalism —and in the statements of movement activists like John Jordan:

Our movements are trying to create a politics that challenges all the certainties of traditional leftist politics, not by replacing them with new ones, but by dissolving any notion that we have answers, plans or strategies that are watertight or universal…We are trying to build a politics…that acts in the moment, not to create something in the future but to build in the present, it’s the politics of the here and now.
(more…)

Saul Newman
March 2006

In 1798, Kant wrote the following about the French Revolution:

But even if the end viewed in connection with this event should not now be attained, even if the revolution or reform of a national constitution should finally miscarry, or, after some time had elapsed, everything should relapse into its former rut (as politicians now predict), that philosophical prophecy should lose nothing of its force. For this event is too important, too much interwoven with the interest of humanity, and its influence too widely propagated in all areas of the world to not be recalled on any favourable occasion by nations which would then be roused to a repetition of new efforts of this kind…

For Kant, the enthusiasm that the1789 Revolution inspired in onlookers was a clear sign of human progress. It revealed a disposition for improvement and a confidence in being able to achieve the fundamental goal of humanity – a republican constitution which would, moreover, prevent offensive war. Even if the upheaval itself proved to be a failure, even if it drowned itself in blood, the Revolution created a permanent fissure in the fabric of time, inscribing itself on the collective memory of history. It was an event which would continue to exist, whose significance would continue to reverberate long after the din of cannons had died away and despite the restoration of reactionary regimes in its wake. It would be a permanent horizon of human progress - something which could be recalled to memory and invoked in subsequent struggles.
(more…)

by Saul Newman

Max Stirner and Michel Foucault are two thinkers not often examined together. However, it has been suggested that the long-ignored Stirner may be seen as a precursor to contemporary poststructuralist thought. Indeed, there are many extraordinary parallels between Stirner’s critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality, and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. However, the purpose of this paper is not merely to situate Stirner in the “poststructuralist” tradition, but rather to examine his thinking on the question of freedom, and to explore the connections here with Foucault’s own development of the concept in the context of power relations and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as deeply problematic, as it involves essentialist and universal presuppositions which are themselves often oppressive. Rather, the concept of freedom must be rethought. It can no longer be seen in solely negative terms, as freedom from constraint, but must involve more positive notions of individual autonomy, particularly the freedom of the individual to construct new modes of subjectivity. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness [Eigenheit] to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest in this paper that such a theory of ownness as a non-essentialist form of freedom has many similarities with Foucault’s own project of freedom, which involves a critical ethos and an aestheticization of the self. Indeed, Foucault questions the anthropological and universal rational foundations of the discourse of freedom, redefining it in terms of ethical practices. Both Stirner and Foucault are therefore crucial to the understanding of freedom in a contemporary sense–they show that freedom can no longer be limited by rational absolutes and universal moral categories. They take the understanding of freedom beyond the confines of the Kantian project–grounding it instead in concrete and contingent strategies of the self.
(more…)

Dmitrov (Moscow province)
21 December, 1920
Respected Vladimir Illich,
An announcement has been placed in Izvestiia and in Pravda which makes known the decision of the Soviet government to seize as hostages SRs [Social Revolutionary party members] from the Savinkov groups, White Guards of the nationalist and tactical center, and Wrangel officers; and, in case of an [assassination] attempt on the leaders of the soviets, to “mercilessly exterminate” these hostages.
Is there really no one around you to remind your comrades and to persuade them that such measures represent a return to the worst period of the Middle Ages and religious wars, and are undeserving of people who have taken it upon themselves to create a future society on communist principles? Whoever holds dear the future of communism cannot embark upon such measures.
Is there really no one around you to remind your comrades and to persuade them that such measures represent a return to the worst period of the Middle Ages and religious wars, and are undeserving of people who have taken it upon themselves to create a future society on communist principles? Whoever holds dear the future of communism cannot embark upon such measures.
It is possible that no one has explained what a hostage really is? A hostage is imprisoned not as punishment for some crime. He is held in order to blackmail the enemy with his death. “If you kill one of ours, we will kill one of yours.” But is this not the same thing as leading a man to the scaffold each morning and taking him back, saying: “Wait awhile, not today…”
(more…)