Autonomies

(Photographs by Alexey Titarenko)

In revolution, everything happens incredibly quickly, just like in dreams in which people seem to be freed from gravity.

Gustave Landauer, Revolution

We have merely to tear down the Bastilles of the future, restructure the past and live each second as though an eternal return ensured its recurrence in an endless cycle.

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

1. Revolutions “are the only historical events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of the beginning.” (1)  The words are Hannah Arendt’s and they impose on any reflection on revolution an equal consideration of time. And as events which do not merely change circumstances, but erupt into history, generating new temporalities, the “subject” of revolution, the creative agency that brings it about, is also not far to be found. The revolutionary subject breaks the flow of rectilinear time, and inaugurates a new time, a new history, the history of freedom. (2)  In Marxist attire, the irreversible, linear time of history is constituted through commodity production (time is universal, abstract labour time embodied in commodity exchange value) and all other uses of time must be repressed. The counter-time of revolution is then to be located in the proletariat. “In the demand to live the historical time which it makes, the proletariat finds the simple unforgettable centre of its revolutionary project; and every attempt (thwarted until now) to realise this project makes a point of possible departure for new historical life.” (3)