Conjuncture and revolution
It is a fact on which we should never tire of reflecting that one of the key terms in our political vocabulary – “revolution” – has been taken from astronomy, where it designates the movement of a planet as it travels through its orbit. But another term which, in the general tendency to replace political categories with economic categories that characterises our time, has also replaced revolution, comes from the astronomical lexicon. We refer to the term “conjuncture”, to which Davide Stimilli has paid special attention in an exemplary study.
This term, which denotes “the phase of the economic cycle that economic activity goes through in a given period of short duration”, is in fact a modification of the term “conjunction”, which means the coincidence of the position of several heavenly bodies at a given time.
Stimilli quotes the passage from Warburg’s essay, La divinazione antica pagana in testi e immagini dell’età di Lutero, where conjunction and revolution are juxtaposed: “Only within vast periods of time, called revolutions, could such conjunctions be expected. In a carefully conceived system, great and maximal conjunctions were distinguished; the latter were the most dangerous, resulting from the meeting of the higher planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. The more conjunctions coincided, the more frightening the situation seemed to be, although the planet with the most favourable character could influence the worst.” And it is significant that it was precisely a revolutionary like Auguste Blanqui, disappointed in his expectations, who at the end of his life came to conceive the history of mankind as something which, like the movement of the stars, repeats itself infinitely and eternally stages the same representations.
What is happening before our eyes today is exactly such a phenomenon, in which an economic conjuncture, by its very nature contingent and arbitrary, tries to impose its terrifying domination over the whole of social life. The link between politics and the stars must therefore be completely abandoned, and the tie that seeks to intertwine astronomical destiny and revolution, necessity and economic conjuncture, natural science and politics, must be severed in all areas. Politics is inscribed neither in the celestial spheres nor in the laws of economics: it is in our weak hands and in the lucidity with which we refute all pretensions to imprison it in conjunctures and revolutions.
Source: Giorgio Agamben, “Congiuntura e rivoluzione”, Quodlibet, 15/01/2025
Will the real Proudhon please stand up?
From Freedom News (20/01/2025).
Instead of anarchist lore, we need historical context and an open mind
Shawn P Wilbur
It’s challenging to think about Pierre-Joseph Proudhon today: like it or not, we struggle with him in his role as a progenitor, precursor, pioneer, as the first to say “Je suis anarchiste”, under circumstances where that declaration simply could not mean what it has meant to subsequent anarchists. We recognize him as the author of the phrase “property is theft,” which we are happy to repeat with or without understanding his specific anti-capitalist critique. We linger (with good reason) on his shortcomings: his public anti-feminism, his private bursts of anti-semitism, perhaps his positions on the strike. We question whether his mutualism was radical enough to achieve anarchy. We are also often told that Proudhon changed his mind about some fundamental things later in life, like property and maybe even anarchy. And when all of the pieces don’t seem to fit together, we settle on him being a “man of paradox”.
Continue reading →