From the Verso Books blog (19/11/2025).
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Mario Tronti: Towards a Critique of Political democracy
Democracy has problems with freedom. if it is true that real democracy is configured as liberal-democracy and that in the end this has been the winning solution, it is precisely this conjunction, binding together freedom (or liberty) and democracy, that must be critically attacked. It is a matter of detaching and juxtaposing the two terms—freedom versus democracy—because democracy is identity to the same extent that freedom is difference. The problem of democracy must then be confronted on two sides: a deconstructive critique of democracy must be accompanied by a constructive theory, what I would call a foundational or re-foundational theory of freedom, of the concept and practice of freedom. As we elaborate the figure of the subject, we should keep in mind that the subject needs to retrace the form of freedom. Because it is precisely difference that is the foundational element of freedom and the dislocating element of democracy.
A reflection for our times …
(Source: Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009)
A word of warning: my argument will involve a deconstruction of the theme of democracy. I will seek to clear the field of the conceptual debris that has accumulated around the idea and practice of democracy, so that our discussion can then take up—in a more constructive and also more programmatic manner—the identification of further directions of inquiry, especially in what concerns that crucial passage represented by the construction of the subject.
Continue readingLuca Salza: Philosophy on a boat
“The history of philosophy is buried in Gaza, but philosophy lives on in the gesture of the Global Sumud Flotilla.”
In this article, historian and philosopher Luca Salza[1] reflects on what he sees as the political, philosophical and strategic significance of the Gaza flotilla: “What did they betray? They betrayed the reality imposed by those in power: the economy above all else, even at the cost of genocide (…), democracy as the unsurpassable form of government, endemic racism in the West, the beauty and righteousness of war for domination, and all the other simulacra on which politics and the way of life in the global North are based.”
From lundimatin #497, 17/11/2025
I just want the world to see what I see.
Fatma Hassouna
Nothing happened.
Nothing.
In Gaza, nothing happened.
Nothing.
Palestinian men and women can return to their homes. Their children are going back to school. Shopkeepers are reopening their shops, farmers are returning to work the land. The olive harvest will soon begin.
The storms of steel, the blocking of food aid, the shooting of starving crowds, terrorist incursions into hospitals and classrooms, the targeted assassinations of poets and journalists, the destruction of universities, and the devastation of the few remaining arable fields did not happen: these events evaporated.
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged insurrection, israel, Luca Salza, palestine, revolution, State terror
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How Everyday Organizing Stopped Trump’s Bay Area ICE Surge
In this article a member of Black Rose/Rosa Negra’s California Bay Area Local reflects on the organizing that made recent mobilizations to oppose a “surge” of federal agents in their region both possible and successful. (06/11/2025)
Juan Verala Luz
Between October 22nd and 26th, the Bay Area successfully stood down a planned incursion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and operations. While an official narrative has emerged that backroom maneuvering by local tech capital reversed plans for the “surge,” this version of events leaves out how Bay Area residents mobilized forcefully en masse to protect one another. Far from a spontaneous response to an immediate crisis, political and social movement organizations had been diligently preparing for this moment since Trump’s 2024 electoral victory.
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Posted in Commentary, News blog
Tagged anti-statism, migration, State and terror, united states
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Raúl Zibechi: Gaza is Rio de Janeiro. Gaza is the whole world
From Redes Libertarias (07/11/2025)
There are no words to describe the horror we feel at the massacre of more than 130 poor black youths killed by the Rio de Janeiro police, under the pretext of attacking drug trafficking.
It was an urban warfare operation in which the state government mobilised 2,500 military police armed for war, in addition to deploying armoured vehicles and helicopters to attack the Penha and Alemão favela complexes in the northern part of the city, an area with a high concentration of poor people. These are two favela complexes with more than 150,000 inhabitants and an extremely high population density.
Continue readingFor Paolo Virno (1952-2025)
Héctor Pávon: For you, what is the meaning of the word revolution today?
Paolo Virno: Perhaps we could do without the word revolution because this model was that of taking power and constructing a new State. It may be better to speak of exodus. I think that the model of exodus is a rich one. Exodus means, more than taking power or subduing it, exiting. Exiting means constituting a distinct context, new experiences of non-representative democracy, new modes of production. It offers a third possibility, and I am not speaking – please! – of the “Third way” but rather of a politics of the extinction of the State being positively constructive, opposing the word republic to the word State. This means constructing a nonstatal republic with a movement that emerges more from exodus and positive experiments than from revolutions in the classical sense. The latter were an intelligent activity for many generations, but lead to the idea of constructing a new State. The point is no longer a monopoly over decision, which is to say multitude: many, plurality.
In memory of Paolo Virno, we share a 2004 interview with him by Héctor Pavón.
Continue readingFor Peter Watkins (1935-2025)
History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now [Jetztzeit]. For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle [Dickicht: maze, thicket] of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before. Only it takes place in an arena in which the ruling classes are in control.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. Having said this much, we have nevertheless still not addressed our question. Why should we be at all interested in perceiving the obscurity that emanates from the epoch? Is darkness not precisely an anonymous experience that is by definition impenetrable, something that is not directed at us and thus cannot concern us? On the contrary, the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him. Darkness is something that – more than any light – turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.
Giorgio Agamben, What Is The Contemporary?
Making a film is a social act, a political act, a human act of work, love and communication.
Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins’ recent death (30/10/2025) was the occasion to recall how much his films conveyed a radical sense of history, and in their very “artificiality”, a portrait of anarchic creativity.
Our debt to Watkins is considerable and we remember him here – as we have done in the past – with an essay by the historian David Armitage and a selection of his films and interviews.
Continue readingClaiming Freedom in Revolution and in War: an Introduction to the Anarchist Group in Sudan
From Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation (30/10/2025)
In 2024, Black Rose/Rosa Negra’s International Relations Committee began working closely with anarchist revolutionaries in Sudan. This relationship has involved the exchange of ideas, practical advice, and support.
Earlier in 2025, Black Rose/Rosa Negra organized a campaign to raise $20,000 USD on behalf of our Sudanese comrades, which they have since used to purchase a printing press.
In this article, developed in consultation with our Sudanese comrades, we provide a written account of how the organization now known as the Anarchist Group in Sudan (AGS) came into being.
Giorgio Agamben: War is peace
Among the horrors of war that are often forgotten is its survival in peacetime through industrial transformations. It is well known – but forgotten – that the barbed wire with which many still fence their fields and properties comes from the trenches of the First World War and is stained with the blood of countless dead soldiers; it is well known – but forgotten – that the inflatable boats that fill our beaches were invented for the Normandy landings during the Second World War; it is well known – but forgotten – that the herbicides used in agriculture are derived from those used by the Americans to deforest Vietnam; and, as a final and worst consequence, nuclear power plants with their indestructible waste are the “peaceful” transformation of atomic bombs. And it is worth remembering, as Simone Weil understood, that external war is always also a civil war, that foreign policy is, in reality, domestic policy. Reversing Clausewitz’s formula, today politics is nothing more than the continuation of war by other means.
Quodlibet, October 23, 2025
Posted in Commentary
Tagged anti-militarism, civil war, Giorgio Agamben, State and terror
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Tristan Lefort-Martine: The irrational springs of the support for fascism
lundimatin, #498, 24/11/2025
The title says it all: this short article addresses the problem, identified early on by Wilhelm Reich, posed by the irrationalism espoused by far-right ideology for its criticism, and draws on the work of Alice Miller and Alain Bihr to identify its psychological roots in as schematic and down-to-earth a manner as possible.
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