Metaphors of the Revolution: Architecture vs. Composition

By Joseph Orosco (November 6, 2019)

We are entering into the thick of presidential electoral politics as the Democratic party narrows its contenders to take on Trump.  There are pundits looking to see what can be learned about the mid-term elections of 2018 for creating a “Blue Wave,” and others wondering if the impeachment proceedings will lead to electoral turmoil before November 2020.

One of the argument strains going on on center-left circles is, of course, the old binary of reform vs. revolution, and whether the pronouncements of Bernie and AOC amount to “real” socialism, or whether Elizabeth Warren represents a more “measured” reform path compared to Bernie, etc.

A few weeks ago I found this video of Roberto Unger, the social theorist and philosopher at Harvard Law, and former advisor to Lula in Brazil.  What was interesting for me was a metaphor that he uses at about 5:30 into the video.

He says one the barriers to radical social change is a legacy of movements that claim that a “revolution” is like the practice of architecture.  By this, I think he means that make radical social change you need to first begin with a deep understanding of the conditions and materials you have at hand and build a blueprint for action.  Your blueprint determines your endpoint and the strategy to achieve it.

Unger wants to substitute the idea of revolution as something like musical composition.  Instead of knowing exactly where you want to go, you move forward by thinking of the progression of notes and how they follow.  This doesn’t mean that the same notes need to follow from what has come before, but you ought to see each note as building forward from what came just before it.  This doesn’t mean you can’t take radically new directions, but you see that such things happen as following from a progression of steps.

I take it this means that that radical social change can happen incrementally, like notes in a song; and that we shouldn’t get overwhelmed because we can’t imagine what the endpoint should be and don’t have a grand theory to explain how to start the revolution right now.

Is Unger’s music metaphor helpful in thinking about how we might move ahead to think about revolutionary change?

 

Post Modern Anarchist Revolution Coming (Hide the Meta-narratives)

By Joseph Orosco (October 30, 2018)

Ever wonder what the post modern anarchist revolution would look like?

“To have a successful post-modern anarchist revolution, it is necessary to pragmatically demolish, both conceptually and materially, bourgeois-capitalist socio-economic conditions; i.e., capitalist forces of production and capitalist relations of production, in order to install a patchwork plurality of autonomous-collectives, narratives and worker-cooperatives.

Specifically, a successful post-modern anarchist revolution will demolish the concept of private property and the bourgeois-state so as to foster forms of communal organization that maximize equality, autonomy and heterogeneity. To quote Bakunin, the goal is to have a society where all micro-narratives have equal access to resources, in relative equal measure, whereupon no-one is privileged over anyone else and “workers take possession of all [forms of] capital and the tools of production”, whether, these are conceptual tools and/or material tools. No meta-narrative must be allowed to have dominion over the plethora of micro-narratives, sharing the sum of capital, in relative equal measure.”

You can read more here.

 

Kevin Van Meter: “Guerrillas of Desire”

As part of the Anarres Project series, Revolution:  Past-Present-Future, we hosted author Kevin Van Meter in a community conversation about his new book Guerrillas of Desire:  Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible.

Behind the smiling faces of cashiers, wait staff, and workers of all sorts, a war is going on, usually without the knowledge of official political and labor organizations. Guerrillas of Desire begins with a provocation: The Left is wrong. It’s historical and current strategies are too-often based on the assumption that working and poor people are unorganized, acquiescent to systems of domination, or simply uninterested in building a new world. The fact is, as C.L.R. James has noted, they “are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention”: pilfering, sabotaging, faking illnesses, squatting, fleeing, and counter-strategizing. Kevin Van Meter maps these undercurrents, documenting the history of everyday resistance under slavery, in peasant life, and throughout modern capitalism, while showing that it remains an important factor in revolution and something radicals of all stripes must understand.

Revolution: Past-Present-Future

(October 11, 2017)

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The Anarres Project for Alternative Futures announces a new series for Fall, marking the hundred year anniversary of revolutionary social change in Russia.  We will be hosting several events that seeks to understand the dynamics of social upheaval and political transformation.  We also want to know what we can learn today about revolutions from the past in order to imagine and build a more just and beautiful society in the future.

 

  1.  Guerrillas of Desire: A Conversation on Revolution, Organizing, and Everyday Resistance

Author Kevin Van Meter will join us to discuss his new book, Guerrillas of Desire (AK Press, 2017) on Friday, October 20, 2017 in MU 213 (Pan Afrikan Room) from 4-6pm.

About the book:
Behind the smiling faces of cashiers, wait staff, and workers of all sorts, a war is going on, usually without the knowledge of official political and labor organizations. Guerrillas of Desire begins with a provocation: The Left is wrong. It’s historical and current strategies are too-often based on the assumption that working and poor people are unorganized, acquiescent to systems of domination, or simply uninterested in building a new world. The fact is, as C.L.R. James has noted, they “are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention”: pilfering, sabotaging, faking illnesses, squatting, fleeing, and counter-strategizing. Kevin Van Meter maps these undercurrents, documenting the history of everyday resistance under slavery, in peasant life, and throughout modern capitalism, while showing that it remains an important factor in revolution and something radicals of all stripes must understand.

https://www.akpress.org/guerrillas-of-desire.html

Sponsored by: Coalition of Graduate Employees (CGE), Corvallis-Albany I.W.W., Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, Allied Students for Another Politics (ASAP).

 

2. American Revolutionary:  The Grace Lee Boggs Story:  Film and Discussion

Join us to view the documentary “American Revolutionary:  The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs”, with discussion on October 25, 2017 in Milam Hall 218 at 6pm.

“The documentary film, AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS, plunges us into Boggs’s lifetime of vital thinking and action, traversing the major U.S. social movements of the last century; from labor to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, the Asian American and environmental justice movements and beyond. Boggs’s constantly evolving strategy—her willingness to re-evaluate and change tactics in relation to the world shifting around her—drives the story forward. Angela Davis, Bill Moyers, Bill Ayers, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Danny Glover, Boggs’s late husband James and a host of Detroit comrades across three generations help shape this uniquely American story. As she wrestles with a Detroit in ongoing transition, contradictions of violence and non-violence, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the 1967 rebellions, and non-linear notions of time and history, Boggs emerges with an approach that is radical in its simplicity and clarity: revolution is not an act of aggression or merely a protest. Revolution, Boggs says, is about something deeper within the human experience — the ability to transform oneself to transform the world.”

3.  Revolution Matters:  A Discussion on the Lessons from Comparative Revolutions.

Join us for a community discussion with Dr. Barbara Muraca, Dr. Joseph Orosco, Dr. Robert Thompson, and Dr. Tony Vogt about what we can learn from the Haitian Revolution, Mexican Revolution, Russian Revolution, and the German Sparticist Uprising of 1918 for making social change today.

Thursday, November 9, 2017, in MU 208 (La Raza Room) at 12 noon.

Co sponsored by:  Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, Allied Students for Another Politics, and Students United for Palestinian Equality.