Dilip Simeon Permanent spring: Seminar # 607, March 2010 ON 30 April 1908, two young men, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose, entered the boundary of the Muzaffarpur Club in Bihar and waited for the hated judge Douglas Kingsford to appear. They were members of Jugantar, the foremost nationalist-revolutionary group to emerge during the Swadeshi movement… Read More Permanent Spring: Indian Maoism and the Philosophy of Insurrection
First posted December 08, 2018 As a student, he led the 1968 uprising in Paris. Now he has Macron’s ear, but ‘Dany le Rouge’ is not afraid to speak out on why both sides are at fault The last time Paris burned, his was the face of insurrection. Dany le Rouge (Danny the Red – a nickname… Read More May 1968 was a revolution. Now the violence is just frightening: Daniel Cohn-Bendit
First posted August 20, 2018 By the summer of 1968, Americans were dying at a rate of more than 1,000 per month in the bloodiest year of the Vietnam war Where the National Guard once stood in formation with bayonets fixed, a line of stands for rental bikes now stretches away along South Michigan Avenue.… Read More ‘The whole world is watching’: how the 1968 Chicago police riot shocked America. By David Taylor and Sam Morris
First posted August 25, 2019 They were an odd pair. Albert Camus was French Algerian, a pied-noir born into poverty who effortlessly charmed with his Bogart-esque features. Jean-Paul Sartre, from the upper reaches of French society, was never mistaken for a handsome man. They met in Paris during the Occupation and grew closer after the Second World… Read More Sam Dresser: How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free
Richard J. B. Bosworth Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič It’s 100 years since Mussolini took political control of Italy. Given a period of violent tensions across large parts of Europe after the First World War, what specifically lay behind the rise of fascist totalitarianism? And how does the Duce’s leadership compare to that of other contemporary authoritarianism?… Read More March on Rome under scrutiny
NB: Aaron Sorkin’s film The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a tribute to the people of conscience who resisted the imperialist war on Vietnam. I salute the comrades of our generation for whom the struggle of the Vietnamese people was an emblem of human solidarity against injustice. Over 3 million Vietnamese were killed, and… Read More Celeste – Hear My Voice: from The Trial of the Chicago 7
As was the case with the British Empire, today’s global form of extractive capitalism is a system of human sacrifice hidden in plain sight. A critical look at the palm oil industry reveals both the violence of this trajectory in an exemplary way and the challenges for a transition into a just world, social thinker… Read More The Sacrificial Altar of Extractive Capitalism: Notes on Abolition and Transition
First posted January 26, 2017 Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the… Read More Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) : Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968
He and I had quarreled. A quarrel doesn’t matter – even if those who quarrel never see each other again – just another way of living together without losing sight of one another in the narrow little world that is allotted us. It didn’t. keep me from thinking of him, from feeling that his eyes… Read More Jean-Paul Sartre: Tribute to Albert Camus (February 1960)
First posted December 10, 2012 From the Socialist Register, 1974 Dear Edward Thompson Why I am not very happy about this public correspondence is because your letter deals as much (at least) with personal attitudes as with ideas. However I have no personal accounts to settle either with Communist ideology or with the year 1956;… Read More My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski’s correspondence with E. P. Thompson (1974)
