Why are we able to describe and analyse the old that is fading away, but we are unable to imagine the new? Perhaps because we believe, more or less unconsciously, that the new is something that arrives – we don’t know from where – after the end of the old. The inability to think the new is thus revealed in the imprudent use of the prefix ‘post’: the new is the post-modern, the post-human, in any case, something that comes after. The truth is precisely the opposite: the only way for us to think the new is to read it and decipher its hidden features in the forms of the old that passes away and dissolves. This is what Hölderlin clearly states in the extraordinary fragment on The Declining Fatherland, where the perception of the new is inseparable from the memory of the old that is sinking and whose figure, in fact, we must lovingly assume in some way. That which has served its time and which seems to dissolve loses its actuality, is emptied of its meaning and somehow becomes possible again. Benjamin suggests something similar when he writes that, in the instant of remembrance, the past, which seemed completed, shows itself to be incomplete and thus offers us the most precious gift: possibility. Truly new is only the possible: if it were already actual and effective, it would inevitably be destined to age and decay. And the possible does not come from the future, but is, in the past, that which was not, which perhaps will never be, but which could have been and which therefore concerns us. We perceive the new only when we are able to grasp the possibility that the past – that is, the only thing we have – offers us for an instant, before it disappears forever. It is in this way that we should refer to the Western culture that today, all around us, is unravelling and dissolving.
On 2 April, Donald Trump announced the imposition of sweeping tariffs on countries across the world, hitting allies and enemies alike with massive trade barriers, in what amounted to an outright assault on the ideology of free trade. A 34% tariff would be imposed on China, 20% on the European Union, 49% on Cambodia, 48% on Laos, 46% on Vietnam, and so on: figures devised according to a simplified mathematical formula, in which the US goods trade deficit with any given country was divided by the value of US imports for that country, and that number was then divided in half. The Wall Street Journal lamented that Trump was ‘blowing up the world trading system’ and reverting to the ‘old era of trade protectionism’. For the Financial Times it was ‘an astonishing act of self-harm’, which would ‘upend the global economic order and tarnish US prosperity’. Investors soon went into meltdown. Key stock indexes plunged and roughly $10 trillion worth of market value was erased.
Alleged gang members deported under Alien Enemies Act. In this photo provided by El Salvador’s presidential press office, prison guards transfer deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (El Salvador presidential press office via AP)
I’ve seen disposable razors on mountaintops outside San Diego. I’ve seen plaid flannel shirts caught on the branches of low trees, trembling in the breeze near Bisbee. I’ve watched a pink backpack tumble across the desert floor. I’ve saved sheriffs’ blotter reports; in one, ‘human remains recovered in the desert’ near Lukeville, Arizona, sounds as ordinary as a stolen car.
We publish an article by Yavor Tarinski, published in the Transnational Institute of Social Ecology (23/03/2025) and generously passed onto to us by the author, about recent protests in various Balkan countries and the centrality of peoples “assemblies” or “plenums” in these movements; “assemblies” that hark back at least to the 2014 protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that point to the broader significance of “direct democracy” in movements for justice.
Today, plenums are talking about a new type of direct democracy.
We see that in different temporal and spatial realities, in moments of social upheaval, that societies begin to move and self-organize. There is a common trait that often connects such experiences – the emergence of grassroots institutions that allow for direct participation of the citizenry. These reflect what CLR James has termed as universal sentiment towards direct democracy.[2] Such democratic institutions emerged during the French Revolution in the form of sectionalassemblies[3], in the heyday of the Haitian Revolution as organs of thepeople[4], in the early stages of the Russian Revolution as soviets[5], throughout the Spanish Revolution in the shape of popular committees[6].
Lastivka is a Ukrainian activist, squatter, anarchist, feminist and samba musician-dancer. She joined the front in 2022 and is now the commander of a drone unit.
How the creation of autonomous, self-organised and horizontal communities has influenced the reality of armed resistance. Which missions have been the most difficult for them. What challenges the fighters face after 4 years of war. What Western activists need to be prepared for. Whether or not there is a gap between civilian and military spaces.
Mourners gather around the bodies of Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army, at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on March 18, 2025 [Abdel Kareem Hana/AP]
Every house that the Israelis destroy, every life that they murder on a daily basis, and even every school day that they make the children of Palestine lose, take with them a part of the immense deposit of truth and wisdom that, in and for Western culture, was accumulated by the generations of the Diaspora, from the glorious or infamous misfortune of the ghettos, from the ferocity of persecutions old and new. A great Jewish Christian woman, Simone Weil, reminded us that the sword hurts on both sides. I dare add: it sometimes wounds on more than two sides. Each day of war against the Palestinians, or of false consciousness for the Israelis, means that a house, a memory, a parchment, a sentiment, a verse, a moulding, is imperceptibly humiliated and disappears from our lives and our homeland. A poet once spoke of the outlaw and his ‘calm and lofty gaze/ That damns a whole people around a scaffold’ [Baudelaire, “The Litanies of Satan”]: well, all around the ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, every day the State of Israel risks a condemnation far more serious than that of the UN, a trial that will open within it, between it and itself, if it does not decide to get drunk as Babylon did before it.
Franco Lattes Fortini, “Letter to the Italian Jews”, lundimatin #467, (21/03/2025)
What is the power, or even usefulness of thought, before the physical violence of mass murder? Perhaps none in the end. But if that is so, then the end of human life should be openly desired, for we would be irredeemable.
We try, here, while acutely aware of the limitations of the exercise, to modestly reflect on the ongoing genocide in Gaza; to try to think through the conditions of possibility of a violence which seems to defy comprehension.
And we engage in this with Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt and René Schérer as our guides.
U.S. auto worker Sean Crawford (right, in hat) thanked Mexican auto worker Israel Cervantes (left) for his solidarity when they met in 2023. Cervantes and other Mexican General Motors workers had refused overtime when GM workers in the U.S. were on strike in 2019.
During the 2019 General Motors strike, while my fellow workers and I were pounding the pavement, something inspirational was happening south of the border: Mexican auto worker Israel Cervantes, along with many others at a GM plant in Silao, Guanajuato, refused overtime in solidarity with us.
Their practical action was particularly helpful to our cause because they built large trucks, which are the main source of revenue for our common employer. Israel was fired soon afterward, and he went on to help build the National Independent Union for Workers in the Automotive Industry (SINTTIA), ousting an employer-friendly union in Silao. SINTTIA has just won 10 percent raises for Mexican GM workers.
As talk of tariffs grows to a fever pitch, we should all take a page from Israel’s book if we want to build a more powerful, connected, and assertive labor movement. Time and time again, he has acted in solidarity with his fellow workers, regardless of which side of a border they live on.
What is significant is not what ends and consecrates, but what initiates, announces and prefigures.
Achille Mbembe
What time are we living in? How can we describe our time? For critical thinking, something decisive is at stake in this question of names, the names of the epoch. The map of names orients strategies, points out the movements of the adversary, reveals possible resistances.
What are we facing today? If we don’t know its name, how can we fight it?
If Trump’s electoral success is due in part to the far right’s ability to create a lifeworld shaped around his persona, the left must pursue a countervailing project. Its aim should be to transform the world people organically experience through mediating institutions: at work, at school, in their neighbourhoods. They should be contesting reality on this basic level.
The leftist critique of social democracy – leaving aside the historical complexity of the ideology and movement, social democracy was and remains essentially the view “that originally advocated a peaceful evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes” (Britannica) – may be summarised in the idea that only a radical transformation can bring capitalist social relations to an end. Whether in its Bolshevik or anarchist guise, “revolution” is opposed to what is disparagingly referred as “reformism”.
The critique is complex, citing citing historical example – the effort to reform capitalism, pushing it towards some form of socialism, has universally failed – and theoretical elaboration. And yet, the “revolution”/”reformism” opposition has perhaps never been so unclear, if it ever was. The historical socialist revolutions have, it can be argued, also universally failed and many of the state-government “reforms” of the last century and a half – pushed and forced by mass working class movements, women’s movements, anti-colonial liberation movements, civil rights movements, that altered capitalist social relations, to some extent “socialising” them – have been “revolutionary”.
Where we fall in this debate has less to do with clearly identifying who is in the right – social life over time permits no such omniscience -, but with endeavouring to understand what can and should be done in the here and now, with a universal justice as the horizon of our political imaginary and practice, which for the anarchist necessarily involves creating “institutions” which permit the greatest degree of freedom and equality possible.
With this cautionary note, we share a finely argued essay on the politics of Donald Trump’s government.
For constitutional lawyers, Trump’s return to power has been a vertiginous experience. The systematic violation of legal process and longstanding constitutional norms has proceeded faster than one can keep up with, resulting in over a hundred lawsuits and counting. Trump has issued a flood of executive orders that explicitly violate congressional law as well as the written text of the Constitution, on everything from the denial of birthright citizenship, to crackdowns on efforts at racial, gender and sexual orientation-based inclusion, to the destruction of legislatively authorized government agencies. At the same time, Elon Musk has boasted that he is pursuing a ‘corporate takeover’ of the federal government, aiming – through mass firing, the selling off of government assets (including ‘443 federal properties’, potentially along with countless works of public art) and the dismantling of vital services – to privatize ‘anything that can reasonably be privatized’: all in violation of congressional and constitutional prohibitions on private citizens, unconfirmed by the Senate, carrying out the work of senior government officials.
Giotto di Bondone, detail from Predella of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata
Heidegger’s abrupt statement in the 1976 “Spiegel” interview: “Only a God can save us” has always been perplexing. To understand it, we must first put it into context. Heidegger had just spoken of the planetary domination of technology, which nothing seems able to govern. Philosophy and other spiritual powers – poetry, religion, the arts, politics – have lost their ability to shake up or guide the lives of Western peoples. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they “cannot produce any immediate change in the present state of the world” and the inevitable consequence that “only a God can save us”.
The fact that this is not a millennial prophecy is confirmed immediately afterwards by the clarification that we must prepare ourselves not only “for the appearance of a God”, but also and rather “for the absence of a God in his decline, for the fact that we fall before the absent God”.
It goes without saying that Heidegger’s diagnosis has lost none of its timeliness; if anything, it is even more irrefutable and true. Humanity has renounced the decisive status of spiritual problems and created a special sphere in which to enclose them: culture. Art, poetry, philosophy and other spiritual forces, when they are not simply extinguished and exhausted, are confined to museums and cultural institutions of all kinds, where they survive as more or less interesting amusements and distractions from the tedium of existence (and often no less tedious).
So how are we to understand the philosopher’s bitter diagnosis? In what sense “only a god can save us”? For nearly two centuries – since Hegel and Nietzsche announced its death – the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom we can give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of divine names (“divine names are missing”, lamented Hölderlin). Beyond the names, the essential remains: the divine. As long as we are capable of perceiving a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a blade of grass as divine, we can do without a nameable God. The divine is enough for us; the adjective is more important than the noun. Not “a God”, but “only the divine can save us”.
Giorgio Agamben: The old and the new
Why are we able to describe and analyse the old that is fading away, but we are unable to imagine the new? Perhaps because we believe, more or less unconsciously, that the new is something that arrives – we don’t know from where – after the end of the old. The inability to think the new is thus revealed in the imprudent use of the prefix ‘post’: the new is the post-modern, the post-human, in any case, something that comes after. The truth is precisely the opposite: the only way for us to think the new is to read it and decipher its hidden features in the forms of the old that passes away and dissolves. This is what Hölderlin clearly states in the extraordinary fragment on The Declining Fatherland, where the perception of the new is inseparable from the memory of the old that is sinking and whose figure, in fact, we must lovingly assume in some way. That which has served its time and which seems to dissolve loses its actuality, is emptied of its meaning and somehow becomes possible again. Benjamin suggests something similar when he writes that, in the instant of remembrance, the past, which seemed completed, shows itself to be incomplete and thus offers us the most precious gift: possibility. Truly new is only the possible: if it were already actual and effective, it would inevitably be destined to age and decay. And the possible does not come from the future, but is, in the past, that which was not, which perhaps will never be, but which could have been and which therefore concerns us. We perceive the new only when we are able to grasp the possibility that the past – that is, the only thing we have – offers us for an instant, before it disappears forever. It is in this way that we should refer to the Western culture that today, all around us, is unravelling and dissolving.
Quodlibet, April 7, 2025