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without which no thinking can presume universality. The question is rather something else: what about other thinkers who operate outside this European philosophical pedigree, whether they practice their thinking in the European languages they have colonially inherited or else in their own mother tongues — in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, thinkers that have actually earned the dignity of a name, and perhaps even the pedigree of a “public intellectual”? What about thinkers outside the purview of these European philosophers; how are we to name and designate and honour and learn from them with the epithet of “public intellectual” in the age of globalized media? Do the constellation of thinkers from South Asia, exemplified by leading figures like Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Sudipta Kaviraj, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha or Akeel Bilgrami, come together to form a nucleus of thinking that is conscious of itself? Would that constellation perhaps merit the word “thinking” in a manner that would qualify one of them — as a South Asian — to the term “philosopher” or “public intellectual”? Michel Foucault
In a lovely little panegyric for the distinguished European philosopher Slavoj Žižek, we read: There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Lu c Nanc y in France , Cha ntal Mouf fe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China. What’s immediately apparent in this opening paragraph is the unabashedly European character and disposition of the thing the author calls “philosophy today” — thus laying a claim on both the subject and time that is peculiar and in fact an exclusive property of Europe. Even Judith Butler who is cited as an example from the United States is decidedly a product of European philosophical genealogy, thinking somewhere between Derrida and Foucault, brought to bear on our understanding of gender and sexuality. To be sure, China and Brazil (and Australia, which is also a European extension) are cited as the
location of other philosophers worthy of the designation, but none of them evidently merits a specific name to be sitting next to these eminent European philosophers. The question of course is not the globality of philosophical visions that all these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and Muslim world (“deep and far,” that is, from a fictive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives. That goes without saying, for without that confidence and self-consciousness these philosophers and the philosophical traditions they represent can scarce lay any universal claim on our epistemic credulities, nor would they be able to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and write a sentence. These are indeed not only eminent philosophers, but the philosophy they practice has the globality of certain degrees of self-conscious confidence
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Why is European philosophy “philosophy,” but African philosophy “ethnophilosophy,” the way Indian music is “ethnomusic”? This is an ethnographic logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History, you only see animals and nonwhite peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages. No cage is in sight for white people and their cultures. They just get to stroll through the aisles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans — all in a single winding row. The same ethnographic gaze is evident in the encounter with the intellectual disposition of the Arab or Muslim world: Azmi Bishara, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Abdallah Laroui, Michel Kilo, Abdolkarim Soroush. The list of prominent thinkers is endless. In Japan, Kojin Karatani, in Cuba, Roberto Fernández Retamar, or even in the United States people like Cornel West, whose thinking is not entirely in the European continental tradition — what about them? Where do they fit in? Can they think? Is what they do also thinking, philosophical, pertinent, perhaps, or is that also suitable for ethnographic examinations?
Are they “South Asian thinkers” or “thinkers” the way these European thinkers are? Why is it that if Mozart sneezes it is “music” but the most sophisticated Indian music ragas are the subject of “ethnomusicology”?
The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blasé. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not? They are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires. They think their particular philosophy is “philosophy” and their particular thinking is “thinking,” and everything else is — as the great European philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas was wont of
Is that “ethnos” not also applicable to the philosophical thinking that Indian philosophers practice — so much so that their thinking is more the subject of Western European and North American anthropological fieldwork and investigation? We can turn around and look at Africa. What about thinkers like Henry Odera Oruka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Okot p’Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, V.Y. Mudimbe: Would they qualify for the term “philosopher” or “public intellectual” perhaps, or is that also “ethnophilosophy”?
saying — “dancing.” The question is rather the manner in which nonEuropean thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever
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Zen Buddhists say: Wash out your mouth every time you say Buddha. To contemporary environmentalists, I wish to say: Wash out your mouth every time you say “Nature” or “Environment”! So long as we live xated on our screens, unacquainted with the smell of dirt, we will remain caught in this double bind: alienated from nature, longing for “Nature.” So long as we feel detached from nature, we will yearn for it — as if it were something separate, as if it were just a concept of our invention, as if we were not born-of and madeof it, as if we could even exist or survive without the relations that comprise it.
J o d i C o b b / N a t i o n a l G e o g r a p h i c S t o c k
So long as we “grow” and “progress” and “develop,” we will dream in screenshots instead of landscapes. Forests, deer and wolves will be good for desktop pictures. We will cordon off our love for only a select few species of animals, while the rest we will use for food, clothing and entertainment. This is why they don’t visit me in my dreams. Why they do not speak to us anymore. Why they run away when humans get close.
In the 2012 edition o Occupy Money , released in the frst week o November last year, Proessor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% o everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, fnanciers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut o our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transerred rom Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense o the poor, not just because o “Wall Street greed” but because o the inexorable mathematics o our private banking system. This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that i they pay their credit card bills on time and don’t take out loans, they aren’t paying interest. This, says Dr. Kennedy, is not true. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain o production rely on credit to pay their bills. They must pay or labor and materials beore they have a product to sell and beore the end buyer pays or the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are passed on to the ultimate consumer. Dr. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging rom 12% or garbage collection, to 38% or drinking water, to 77% or rent in public housing in her native Germany. Her fgures are drawn rom the research o economist Helmut Creutz, writing in German and interpreting Bundesbank publications. They apply to the expenditures o German households or everyday goods and services in 2006; but similar fgures are seen in fnancial sector profts in the United States, where they composed a whopping 40% o U.S. business business profts in 2006. That was fve times the 7% made by the banking sector in 1980. Bank assets, fnancial profts, interest, and debt have all been growing exponentially.
Ellen Brown is an at torney and president of the Public Banking Institute.
Karass Ad, American Way, January 2012
#KILLCAP IN BERLIN
When we rst started dreaming about #killcap at Adbusters , we always imagined that it would take a killer app, a hot developer and tens of thousands of dollars. But now we’re learning from jammers in Berlin that #killcap can be played with nothing more than audacity and a viral video. “The idea of Camover is to destroy as many cctv-cams as possible and for this we decided to announce a competition,” explain the anonymous organizers of this paradigm shifting live-action game. To join in you need a group with a name that starts with command, brigade, cell, platoon, etc. and ends with a historic person. Points are awarded for the most creative acts. It was fun. Word got around. And after a few weeks, a video of the highest scoring Camover jams went global, kicking the game to another level... now players in other cities are joining in! Now we wonder: could #killcap spring up and proliferate just like this?
t t o w hw a i n a r t t t –ooud st a at t e r i s: a a r s: st st a W e’ l l a l s r d d i a sa s hea l t t h c he a y s b l i c w w a puu b l
Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement has emerged as a political powerhouse in Italy after sweeping 25 percent of the vote in the February election on an eco-populist platform.
, v e nd s , p w e’ v ha nd c ha b l i c n puu b l s i n p n’ t t , hoo l s i c ho sc he y d o n’ s , s f t he nd s , s. I f t u s. ha nd w c ha o l b l i c l o f f pu pu b l y e he h t he y s T he u . h. w s h s o r l l a o ha h f f y y r he f t he m , v e he m , c e. I f t r t he v i c need se se r v h f o r t he y ne s h s r T he . a ha h s. s g y ng n r i e h i h v t f t f e b v e o nc e i v t c o nc ba t t t t l e w i l l be not c he ba ee n n no t he a a be b c e v v y ’ ’ e y he h e T he h . T d . nd n a st a peo p l e nd e r st t u nd a i l ed pe nt r y not u a n no c a y a r e f a he c ou nt he y a h t t t he s. T he b r oug ht na l y s i s. ve b r c a na ha v i c a at t r he y ha l a r e h i a c h i i i l l a d t t he nd n y l p s p s y c a l , a s e r r r a l e e y y e f me r 30 r 25 , o r 3 ma k e s me ha ha t t ma he he t W he r e f o r 2 . n i i t he e t t he h a p o l o r f t a st s a ng at t a a y i ng f c a n st t a nt oo f c po i nt bee n s s i s , he po v e be ha v t o t he he c r i s i ha t t ha b y t t he p l e t ha peo p l o f pe y a f f ec t te d b y na l l y a i na g r e a he h t he m i l l i o n s m t he f t f n m n o e t o e nt n be b e m st v e j u st ha v he d et r i me ha t t ha b y t o t he s , t ha mo r e. c r i s i s , st gget b y n y mo d t o j u st t go o n a n y na ged t not g ma na a n no t c a ve ma a t c ha h ha v t e l he ha t t ha p t ha o e pe p f o ng ng a s t he o s l n s l s o i a l l d a i nd m i m A n A f . o t l ot o peo p l e s k he r l r i s k ot he t o f pe t a t t r set o no not a i s se h i h e t r a s i e l m p e l o e b l b pe p o se ’ s ’ p r he se s t a l y s p f t he a st l a I t t a n’ t t l s i o n s o f t w o n’ n s e i pe p h i h t e t t t he h t u B d . nd n y nt r a r i e s a sa sa l a he c ou nt se t he l i se i b i b . l o l a m t a t m m m a i g o ng n t l o ne s t l a st l a ’ s ’ f i ne i t t s f n’ t t l o n’ s s i t t ua t t i o n w ng. T h i s s l o ng
L u c a s J a c k s o n / R e u t e r s
Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house. And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself] And it smells of sulfur still today. Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that’s their democratic model. It’s the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that’s imposed by weapons and bombs and ring weapons. What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy. What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs? The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It’s not that we are extremists. It’s that the world is waking up. It’s waking up all over. And people are standing up … What we now have to do is dene the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceania. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision. We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.
Addressing the UN General Assembly in September of 2006, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez stunned the world’s leaders with a speech that described the U.S. President George W. Bush as “the devil” and called U.S. “imperialism” a menace. This is an abridged version of that courageous speech.
As I watched Barack Obama delivering his second inaugural address last month, and listened to his call to “respond to the threat of climate change” lest we “betray our children and future” generations, I could not help but think of another president.
>>
THIS MACHINE CAUSES GLOBAL WARMING
Sixteen years is all the time we have left to reduce our oil addiction and avert the predicted 2 degree celsius global temperature rise caused largely by automobiles. The #16yearsleft campaign, started by Toronto based activist/art group Our Horizon, is pushing for city councils across the world to put warning labels on gas pumps. Go to ourhorizon.org and start with your hood.
I leave the stickers in my glove compartment so that whenever I’m on a drive, I’ve got a way to earn #killcap points . Stickers are silent, fast and effective. I just grab some designs from the web and print them at home. It may not earn as many
points as rancid butter in Goldman Sachs, but by now I’ve probably slapped a few h undred memes onto the gasoline pumps around town. I bike whenever possible. I’m a vegan usually. And I o ffset my carbon emissions by playing #killcap.
WHAT WAS THAT BUMP?
Jay Wall, Our Horizon
COMING IN ADBUSTERS #108
THE EPIC STORY OF HUMANITY PART II: SUMMER ¡Por fn! Adbusters en español
In a time of dark apocalyptic forebodings comes an explosive heterodox textbook by Adbusters , the cultural insurgents that launched Buy Nothing Day and Occupy Wall Street. A visual masterpiece in the groundbreaking ow-based aesthetic that Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn has pioneered for twenty years, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is a 400-page manifesto for serious study by the young insurgents who will be tomorrow’s leaders, bankers, cultural and economic theorists …
COMING SOON
ADBUSTERS CHINA
Cover photo: Gil Inoue Model: Esther Varella Top right corner photo: Slim Letaief
A SHIFT IN THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE!
One sixth of the world begins playing #killcap.
O R G E R. O I T O V K I C K
We abandon everything we thought we knew about progress. We completely re-imagine industry, nutrition, communication, transportation, housing and money. Humanity, and the world we depend on, are sustained. – Kalle Lasn
Seven Stories Press (US) (US) | Penguin (UK & Commonwealth) | Random House (Canada) (Canada) Riemann/Random House (Germany) | Fora do Eixo (Brazil) (Brazil) | Open Books (Korea)
ANDY MERRIFIELD
GOLDMAN SACHS HAS 73 OFFICES WORLDWIDE . . .
organizing an insurrection, consolidating it, moving through it, and then planning or its aermath, putting in place something new, establishing a dierent set o social institutions and social relations in lieu o the old oppressive ones. (Simultaneous equations, we might remember, are equations between two unknowns, unknowns that must be solved at the same time.) Tis dual conundrum has preoccupied revolutionaries and revolutionary thought since time immemorial. Walter Benjamin plotted the revolution in his own head, even while — especially while — he lurched toward his shadow gure, Blanqui, the man o action, the arch-conspirator who spent thirty o his seventysix years on earth in various French gaols. Blanqui was everything Benjamin wasn’t: practical, earless, ruthless. His very raison d’être was organization, plotting and propagandizing or the insurrection. Blanqui, Marx said, was the “head and soul” o the French workers’ movement. But Blanqui satises only the rst part o that revolutionary simultaneous equation. “Te activities o a proessional conspirator like Blanqui,” Benjamin says, “certainly do not presuppose any belie in progress — they merely presuppose a determination to do away with present injustice.” Tis rm resolve to snatch humanity at the last moment rom the catastrophe looming at every turn is characteristic o Blanqui — more so than any other revolutionary politician o the time. He always reused to develop plans or what comes “later.”
One o the recurrent g ripes about the movement we’ve come to call “Occupy” has been its ailure to conceive a plan o action, a concerted strategy during its insurrection. Tere wasn’t and still isn’t any strategic campaign, critics say, no coordination between particular occupations, no sense o how to amalgamate and channel all that anger and dissatisaction into a singular, unifed oppositional orce — one that can stick around over the long haul.
AND WE’RE GOING TO HAVE SOME FUN IN FRONT OF EVERY ONE OF THEM!
P u l l o u t a n d p o s t a l l o v e r
Te most recent salvo is Tomas Frank’s in Te Bafer magazine: “With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. ‘Te process is the message’... Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak o, no agenda to transmit to the world.” What comes next aer the insurrection, aer the good guys have assumed power, or even when they’re still trying to wrestle against power? Žižek has been vocal here: “carnivals are cheap,” he says. “What matters is the day aer, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?” Egypt, as a case in point, is still eeling the heat o a “successul” insurrection rom two years ago. Tese two questions are intimately related and orm part and parcel o the same revolutionary simultaneous equation:
Blanqui dreamed o a worldwide league o revolutionary communists. He tried to put that dream into reality, countenancing conspiracy as one method or instigating insurrection. Blanqui’s communism was an eclectic mix o Marxism avant la lettre and heterodox anarchism, o trying to consummate the revolutionary hopes begun in 1789, yet which ended in Termidorian backlash. Blanqui “couldn’t adjust himsel to an organization o huge dimensions,” Samuel Bernstein says in Auguste Blanqui and the Art o Insurrection (1971). “It rendered absurd his strategy o insurrection; and it placed in the oreground the working class which he had never regarded as a key propeller o history.” Blanqui’s political organization was limited in size, Bernstein says, tightly pulled together, hierarchical in structure; made “like a seamless garment, programmatically homogeneous, disciplined, obedient and ready to move.” Blanqui’s insurrection was vertically organized yet spread itsel out horizontally, immanently entering daily lie, not so much a actory struggle as an urban war, a civil war rooted above all else — or below all else — in the street. Te key organizing medium or Blanquists was the “Society o the Seasons,” ormed in the 1830s when Marx was still a reshaced lad. Te society met clandestinely; leaders went unseen; meetings recruited oot soldiers who’d orm an army o revolt, ready or action — violent action. Te Society’s network barely
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kalle Lasn EDITOR-AT-LARGE Micah White SENIOR EDITORS Darren Fleet, Stefanie Krasnow ASSOCIATE EDITOR andrea bennett CREATIVE DIRECTOR Pedro Inoue ART DIRECTOR Ellen Lee FRONT-END DEVELOPER Abdul Rehman Khewar WEB DEVELOPER Karim Ratib WEB ENGINEER Jeremy Teale CIRCULATION MANAGER Ben Rawluk INTERNS Wendee Lang, Kyle Robertson, Dugan Nichols, Barbara Matthews, Meaghan MacAneeley VOLUNTEERS Kevin Estrada, Mike Rae, Allison Thompson PUBLISHERS Kalle Lasn, Bill Schmalz NEWSSTAND SERVICES: SERVICES : Disticor PRINTING: Quad Graphics EMAIL:
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stretched beyond Paris; but its covert nature o cells unnerved the powers that be and meant the Society punched above its weight, or at least threatened to. In Blanqui’s time, these Society o the Seasons were the revolutionary Jacobin clubs orty years down the line. Blanqui may have disagreed; in his early career he admired the “Incorruptible” Jacobin, Robespierre, but later claimed he was really a Hébertist, a descendent o the radical eighteenth-century journalist JacquesRené Hébert. Blanqui knew, just as Robespierre knew, just as any revolutionary today must know, that i an insurrection were to succeed, it would have to muster support rom the aubourgs, rom the banlieues, rom the peripheral hinterlands. Revolutionaries nowadays need to establish cells in the banlieues, cells within urban cells, such that revolutionary activity can ow through the capillaries and arteries o our global urban abric, through its physical and beroptic inrastructure, through its hardware and thoughtware. Tese secret cells must plot to stymie the dominant ow o things and will likely be spearheaded by proessional organizers and tacticians, by black bloc’er anarchists, by socialists and autonomous communists o dierent stripes and persuasions, by anonymous rookies, by those who’ve never yet been politically active, by young casseurs and voyous, by everybody who, with Occupy and the Arab Spring, with the revolt in the banlieues, with the ongoing civil war everywhere, with growing unemployment, have ound some medium to channel and reract their energies and dissatisactions.
it opened its membership to small storeowners and artisans. Over 5,000 clubs operated throughout France; pamphlets and newspapers got published; rallies and processions organized. Aer the all o the monarchy, Robespierre led the Jacobins in the National Convention. But the revolutionary ervor o the Jacobins came through its popularism, through the support o the sans-culottes. “Tose beings,” a 1793 archive says, “who go everywhere on oot, who at no point have millions in the bank, nor a chateau, nor valets at their beck and call; who lodge simply and at night present themselves to their section ... applying all their orce to pulverize those who come rom that abominable action o stately men.” And those stately men, the aristocrats? “Tey’re the rich,” another 1793 document says, “all those at merchants, all the monopolizers, the mountebanks, mountebanks, the bankers, all the swindlers and all those who have something.” Sound amiliar? Just like Goldman Sachs, in act. And a “Society o Friends o Liberty and Equality,” a neo-Jacobin radicalism today that’s as organized and oensive as its namesake rom the 1790s? Why not? Tis time, though, such a society would need to be “popular,” to have its doors open to all types o sans-culottes, and all genders. Meeting halls, debating chambers and political networks might be less grandiose: in caés and on street corners, at youth centers, in university classrooms, anywhere where young people hang out. Dialogue might be online as well as ace-to-ace; a society o “riends” puts another egalitarian spin on Facebook Facebook camaraderie.
But let’s be clear: secrecy would be paramount in these meetings, certainly i nitially, given how the orces o law and order mercilessly cracks down on all subversive politicking. We’ve heard about how the FBI inltrated Occupy Wall Street (OWS), tracked known activists and student radicals, even on college campuses. Te Te Jacobin club was ounded on the eve o “Partnership or Civil Justice Fund” (PCJF), a Revolution, in a Dominican convent on the US watchdog civil rights group, recently blew Seine’s Right Bank, along rue Saint-Honoré. the whistle when they obtained FBI documents: Meetings there were secret debating societies, “rom its inception,” PCJF say, “the FBI treated made up o le-leaning deputies, republican the Occupy movement as a potential criminal enemies o the monarchy who’d push or the and terrorist threat.” FBI ofces and agents, “were constitution o 1791. Te club bore the noble label in high gear conducting conducting surveillance against “Society o Friends o Liberty and Equality.” Later the movement even as early as August 2011, a Perhaps there’s a neo-Jacobinism blowing in wind, not quite bawling out but certainly getting whispered, a revival o Jacobin values with its great desire to abolish slavery in our urban neocolonies, to denounce aristocratic plenty and root or sans-culotte empowerment.
month prior to the establishment o the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.” And in France, especially in the banlieues, the “Brigade AntiCriminalité” (BAC), overtly and covertly, has intensied “special police units” patrolling “les zones sensibles.” As Mathieu Rigouste writes in La Domination Policière , “the generalization generalization o the BAC in urban territories is one o the decisive stamps o the counter-insurrectional restructuring o the police.” I anything, “austerity” these days has become a veritable 9/11 in Europe: a watchword, or neoliberal governments to quieten any dissenting voice. In Greece, where austerity has been most brutally implemented, “centers o lawlessness” have been nipped in the bud. Early this past January, two longstanding “occupied” social centers in Athens, Villa Amalias and Skaramanga, with over 100 makeshi residents, were evicted. Former denizens were promptly arrested in a relentless police war o attrition, “Operation Zeus,” against all those outside the dominant orthodoxy, including undocumented migrants. In Al Jazeera, Antonis Vradis reports rom the rontline: “Te eviction o Villa Amalias and the orthcoming police operation,” Vradis says, “reveals what is an inescapable contradiction in the reormulation o power in the Greek territory: In its short-term quest or stability, it is accelerating long-term social and political change.” Against such short-term desperation or stability comes, then, an urgent and accelerated need or social and political change. Any Jacobin revival has to take us into and through the insurrection; and it has to leave us with something to build upon on the other side, in the aermath. Which leads us to the second part o our revolutionary simultaneous equation. One o the amazing things Eric Hazan points out in Une histoire de la Révolution Française, his resh take on the French Revolution — is how quickly it all happened, how ast an immense and deeply entrenched power structure and administration evaporated, caved in, without warning nor transition. Hazan details the spirit o the Jacobin club: “the Society and its afliates unctioned as a system o diusion o radical ideas. Nothing is more absurd than the notion o ‘Jacobinism’ as an authoritarian Parisian dictatorship. Tat’s a abrication inherited rom the [counter-revolutionary] Termidor, which endures along with a hatred o the Revolution.” Hazan devotes memorable, generous lines to the National Convention, the rst revolutionary assembly elected through universal (male) surage. “Was the Convention representative o the people?” he asks. I considered as an electoral system, wh ich is to say, say, as a system o participatory democracy, then clearly not. Yet the virtues o the Convention, and its suggestive, enduring visionar y politics, ca me and might sti ll come through an altogether dierent means. o be sure, the Convention is still
unprecedented in how it allowed ordinary people to intervene in its sittings. Tat ordinary citizens and not a ew sans-culottes could pass through the hollowed gates o Parliamentary politics was remarkable then and almost unthinkable now. Although the Convention’s Salle du Manège was limited in size, it did manage to receive three thousand citizens at any one time. At tribunals, says Hazan, ordinary olk “didn’t hesitate to noisily speak out their opinion”; deputies were orced to respond on the spot and were directly answerable to peoples’ plain outspokenness, to interrogation rom their constituents. Alongside this popular participation, sittings o the Convention kicked o by listening to peoples’ letters, oen voicing long commentaries on deputies’ propositions, oering suggestions, sympathetic encouragement, angry critique. “In this regard,” concludes Hazan, “the Convention is the rst and only national assembly where the people had been able to have their voice directly heard.” So a message rings out, loud and jarringly: what an insurrection needs to do is orce those Parliamentary doors open, smash them down i necessary, so that “the people” gain access. Not so much a participatory government as the chance or a real representative assembly, one in which elected politicians, or the rst time in centuries, would actually be responsive to their electorate, engaging with them within an open democratic structure. Tey’d be answerable, in other words, to the populace not to the usual powerul suspects. But how to keep counter-revolutionary economic and political interests at bay, how to justiably shut them out o any new Convention, how to ruthlessly shut them out i necessary? Te theme o violence inevitably enters the scene, the idea that there’s a legitimate violence responsive to the everyday violence initiated by the orces o law and order, rom its judiciary to its paramilitary, rom its surveillance and containment to the outright wars it wages against people its power base doesn’t like. War, rom this standpoint, is a just-in-case response, a strikerst-ask-questions-later initiative, a branch o “democracy” that needs to construct its own inconceivable oe: terrorists. Guy Debord conrmed as much back in 1988: “Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. People must certainly never know everything about terrorism,” says Debord, “but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable.” More than two hundred years aer Robespierre’s execution, an ideological logic lives on in governments around the world, one that deles the Jacobin legacy, panders to a revisionist, right-wing Termidorian telling o the truth. Robespierre was a bloody tyrant, a anatical monster, a terrorist butcher. And yet, as Eric Hazan maintains, “Robespierre took positions o great coherence and astonishing courage — positions where he
was always a minority and sometimes absolutely alone: against surage censitaire [census surage], or civic rights, against martial law, against slavery in the colonies, against the death penalty, or the right to petition, or the reedom o the press … In what country, in what assembly, have we ever heard so much contre-courant argument declared with such orce o conviction?” Robespierre was deled, still is deled, because what he said threatened ruling class privilege, upset their status quo; to dele him thus serves to tarnish every uture hope o revolution, o uture social change. “I was born to ght crime,” he says in a nal speech rom 1794. “Te time has not arrived or men o substance to be able to serve their homeland with impunity; deenders o liberty will be outlaws, or as long as the horde o scoundrels predominates.” Let’s get a neo-Jacobin movement going that can contest the “horde o scoundrels” who still predominate. Let’s stand up to their arsenal and their ideologues. Let’s loosen the grip those nancial mountebanks and swindlers have on our society. Let’s organize a concerted insurrection — one that knows what it’s ghting or as well as against. But to do so we need visionaries as well as agitators, conspirators like Blanqui but also leaders like Robespierre, people with big plans and grand convictions — outlaw mathematicians who know, perhaps more than anything else, all about revolutionary simultaneous equations.
Andy Merrield is an independent scholar based in the UK. He has written several books including a biography of Situationist philosopher Guy Debord. His most recent books are Magical Marxism (2011) and John Berger (2012). Email: andy. merri
[email protected]. merri
[email protected].
At the moment, the planet might seem more poised for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to a better world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any signicant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on the collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight. David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A Hi story, a Crisis, a Movement
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INDIGNADOS - ZAPATISTA ZAPATISTAS S - YA BASTA! BASTA! - PUSSY RIOTERS - #KILLCAPPERS
Deanna Budgell
S R E T O I R Y S S U P - ! A T S A B A Y - S R E I P U C C O - S O H C R A N A - S A T S I N U Q Q I T
P I R A T E S - I D L E N O M O R E - J A Z Z E R S - C U L T U R E J A M M E R S - I N D I G N A D O S - Z A P A T I S T A S - Y A B A S T A !
GOLDMAN SACHS HAS 73 OFFICES WORLDWIDE...
AND WE’RE GOING TO HAVE HAVE SOME FUN IN FRONT OF EVERY ONE OF THEM! Goldman Sachs, the most powerul and unrepentant o the fnancial raudsters, has 3 ofces in Canada and 4 in the United Kingdom; 8 in China; 2 separate locations in Madrid and 19 scattered across the United States.
#GOLDMAN is an indefnite realtime, live-action game to shut down each o these locations. Points will be awarded or speed, spectacle, courage and innovation.
We take everything we learned rom Cairo, Madrid and Zuccotti … combine it with the lessons o Quebec, Pussy Riot and Idle No More … and turn #GOLDMAN into a global moment o truth or jus tice.
