ADBUSTERS

THE JOURNAL OF THE

MENTAL ENVIRONMENT

The Epic Story of Humanity: Part 1

May/June 2013 #107 Volume 21 Number 3

-Graeme Maxton, The End of Pro

gress

Cockerel (1938), Pablo Picasso

: The next five issues of Adbusters The epic story of humanity

Roy LIchten stein

Ohhh...Alright... (1964), Roy Lichtenstein

The pro duc t of art must be ent irely devoid of art ific e or ulte rio r mot ive of any kind.

Wanderer Above the Sea and Fog (1818), Caspar David Friedrich

Autumn Landscape, Zhao Ji

without which no thinking can presume universality. The question is rather something else: what about other thinkers who operate outside this European philosophical pedigree, whether they practice their thinking in the European languages they have colonially inherited or else in their own mother tongues in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, thinkers that have actually earned the dignity of a name, and perhaps even the pedigree of a public intellectual? What about thinkers outside the purview of these European philosophers; how are we to name and designate and honour and learn from them with the epithet of public intellectual in the age of globalized media? Do the constellation of thinkers from South Asia, exemplified by leading figures like Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Sudipta Kaviraj, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha or Akeel Bilgrami, come together to form a nucleus of thinking that is conscious of itself? Would that constellation perhaps merit the word thinking in a manner that would qualify one of them as a South Asian to the term philosopher or public intellectual?
Michel Foucault

Why is European philosophy philosophy, but African philosophy ethnophilosophy, the way Indian music is ethnomusic? This is an ethnographic logic that is based on the very same reasoning that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History, you only see animals and nonwhite peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages. No cage is in sight for white people and their cultures. They just get to stroll through the aisles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans all in a single winding row. The same ethnographic gaze is evident in the encounter with the intellectual disposition of the Arab or Muslim world: Azmi Bishara, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Abdallah Laroui, Michel Kilo, Abdolkarim Soroush. The list of prominent thinkers is endless. In Japan, Kojin Karatani, in Cuba, Roberto Fernndez Retamar, or even in the United States people like Cornel West, whose thinking is not entirely in the European continental tradition what about them? Where do they fit in? Can they think? Is what they do also thinking, philosophical, pertinent, perhaps, or is that also suitable for ethnographic examinations? The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blas. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not? They are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires. They think their particular philosophy is philosophy and their particular thinking is thinking, and everything else is as the great European philosopher Emmanuel Lvinas was wont of

There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj iek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China. Whats immediately apparent in this opening paragraph is the unabashedly European character and disposition of the thing the author calls philosophy today thus laying a claim on both the subject and time that is peculiar and in fact an exclusive property of Europe. Even Judith Butler who is cited as an example from the United States is decidedly a product of European philosophical genealogy, thinking somewhere between Derrida and Foucault, brought to bear on our understanding of gender and sexuality. To be sure, China and Brazil (and Australia, which is also a European extension) are cited as the

Untitled (Rosa Luxemburg) 1920, El Lissitzky

In a lovely little panegyric for the distinguished European philosopher Slavoj iek, we read:

location of other philosophers worthy of the designation, but none of them evidently merits a specific name to be sitting next to these eminent European philosophers. The question of course is not the globality of philosophical visions that all these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and Muslim world (deep and far, that is, from a fictive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives. That goes without saying, for without that confidence and self-consciousness these philosophers and the philosophical traditions they represent can scarce lay any universal claim on our epistemic credulities, nor would they be able to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and write a sentence. These are indeed not only eminent philosophers, but the philosophy they practice has the globality of certain degrees of self-conscious confidence

Are they South Asian thinkers or thinkers the way these European thinkers are? Why is it that if Mozart sneezes it is music but the most sophisticated Indian music ragas are the subject of ethnomusicology? Is that ethnos not also applicable to the philosophical thinking that Indian philosophers practice so much so that their thinking is more the subject of Western European and North American anthropological fieldwork and investigation? We can turn around and look at Africa. What about thinkers like Henry Odera Oruka, Ngg wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Okot pBitek, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, V.Y. Mudimbe: Would they qualify for the term philosopher or public intellectual perhaps, or is that also ethnophilosophy?

saying dancing.

The question is rather the manner in which nonEuropean thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever

men.com Jennilee Marigomen, jennileemarigo

Zen Buddhists say: Wash out your mouth every time you say Buddha. To contemporary environmentalists, I wish to say: Wash out your mouth every time you say Nature or Environment! So long as we live fixated on our screens, unacquainted with the smell of dirt, we will remain caught in this double bind: alienated from nature, longing for Nature. So long as we feel detached from nature, we will yearn for it as if it were something separate, as if it were just a concept of our invention, as if we were not born-of and madeof it, as if we could even exist or survive without the relations that comprise it. So long as we grow and progress and develop, we will dream in screenshots instead of landscapes. Forests, deer and wolves will be good for desktop pictures. We will cordon off our love for only a select few species of animals, while the rest we will use for food, clothing and entertainment. This is why they dont visit me in my dreams. Why they do not speak to us anymore. Why they run away when humans get close.

Jodi Cobb/National Geographic Stock

In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money, released in the first week of November last year, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of Wall Street greed but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system. This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that if they pay their credit card bills on time and dont take out loans, they arent paying interest. This, says Dr. Kennedy, is not true. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay their bills. They must pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell and before the end buyer pays for the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are passed on to the ultimate consumer. Dr. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging from 12% for garbage collection, to 38% for drinking water, to 77% for rent in public housing in her native Germany. Her figures are drawn from the research of economist Helmut Creutz, writing in German and interpreting Bundesbank publications. They apply to the expenditures of German households for everyday goods and services in 2006; but similar figures are seen in financial sector profits in the United States, where they composed a whopping 40% of U.S. business profits in 2006. That was five times the 7% made by the banking sector in 1980. Bank assets, financial profits, interest, and debt have all been growing exponentially.
Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute.

Karass Ad, American Way, January 2012

#KILLCAP IN BERLIN

When we first started dreaming about #killcap at Adbusters, we always imagined that it would take a killer app, a hot developer and tens of thousands of dollars. But now were learning from jammers in Berlin that #killcap can be played with nothing more than audacity and a viral video. The idea of Camover is to destroy as many cctv-cams as possible and for this we decided to announce a competition, explain the anonymous organizers of this paradigm shifting live-action game. To join in you need a group with a name that starts with command, brigade, cell, platoon, etc. and ends with a historic person. Points are awarded for the most creative acts. It was fun. Word got around. And after a few weeks, a video of the highest scoring Camover jams went global, kicking the game to another level... now players in other cities are joining in! Now we wonder: could #killcap spring up and proliferate just like this?

Beppe Grillos Five Star Movement has emerged as a political powerhouse in Italy after sweeping 25 percent of the vote in the February election on an eco-populist platform.

pub weve alw blic hands, u p in ls o o h ey dont, s, sc llow us. If th . They fo public hand y e th s u ey follow very harsh eed h for them, service. If th rs a h ry ings. They n e v th f e o b l e il iv w e c le n o the batt ve been e y c a nnot c eople. They erstand. Th p d d n e u il t o fa n n re a country a c brought the alysis. They e n v a a h ic y tr e ia h th c d an lly ill are ps y me feel rea r 30 years, o s , e k 5 a 2 r m t fo a the . Wh there ing afloat in is, atastrophe y c f ta o s t n in e e o p b to the a t h a ve the cris of people th affected by the millions e just been marginally of the e detriment ha v th to y b t e g crisis, that st ny more. anaged to ju ple that cannot go on a m e v a h t a the th o d as long as sk illions of pe n m A f . o le t p lo o r e e p oth set of are not at ri lem is this ese people th f last o Italys prob s n io s e pe n t this wont u th B d . n y a tr s n e u o ri ec sala mobilise th at all. its fine to im uation wont last long it s long. This

what r in o d o t t r a t s Well ays said our stars: wate lic health

Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you.

The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house. And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself] And it smells of sulfur still today. Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterdays statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. They say they want to impose a democratic model. But thats their democratic model. Its the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy thats imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons. What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy. What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs? The imperialists see extremists everywhere. Its not that we are extremists. Its that the world is waking up. Its waking up all over. And people are standing up What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceania. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision. We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.

Addressing the UN General Assembly in September of 2006, Venezuelas President Hugo Chavez stunned the worlds leaders with a speech that described the U.S. President George W. Bush as the devil and called U.S. imperialism a menace. This is an abridged version of that courageous speech.

As I watched Barack Obama delivering his second inaugural address last month, and listened to his call to respond to the threat of climate change lest we betray our children and future generations, I could not help but think of another president.

>>

THIS MACHINE CAUSES GLOBAL WARMING

Sixteen years is all the time we have left to reduce our oil addiction and avert the predicted 2 degree celsius global temperature rise caused largely by automobiles. The #16yearsleft campaign, started by Toronto based activist/art group Our Horizon, is pushing for city councils across the world to put warning labels on gas pumps. Go to ourhorizon.org and start with your hood.

I leave the stickers in my glove compartment so that whenever Im on a drive, Ive got a way to earn #killcap points. Stickers are silent, fast and effective. I just grab some designs from the web and print them at home. It may not earn as many

points as rancid butter in Goldman Sachs, but by now Ive probably slapped a few hundred memes onto the gasoline pumps around town. I bike whenever possible. Im a vegan usually. And I offset my carbon emissions by playing #killcap.

WHAT WAS THAT BUMP?

Jay Wall, Our Horizon

THE EPIC STORY OF HUMANITY PART II: SUMMER

Por fin! Adbusters en espaol

COMING IN ADBUSTERS #108

A SHIFT IN THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE!

In a time of dark apocalyptic forebodings comes an explosive heterodox textbook by Adbusters, the cultural insurgents that launched Buy Nothing Day and Occupy Wall Street. A visual masterpiece in the groundbreaking flow-based aesthetic that Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn has pioneered for twenty years, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is a 400-page manifesto for serious study by the young insurgents who will be tomorrows leaders, bankers, cultural and economic theorists

COMING SOON

ADBUSTERS CHINA

.O OVER KICKIT

RG

We abandon everything we thought we knew about progress. We completely re-imagine industry, nutrition, communication, transportation, housing and money. Humanity, and the world we depend on, are sustained. Kalle Lasn

Cover photo: Gil Inoue Model: Esther Varella Top right corner photo: Slim Letaief

One sixth of the world begins playing #killcap.

Seven Stories Press (US) | Penguin (UK & Commonwealth) | Random House (Canada) Riemann/Random House (Germany) | Fora do Eixo (Brazil) | Open Books (Korea)

ANDY MERRIFIELD

GOLDMAN SACHS HAS 73 OFFICES WORLDWIDE . . .

organizing an insurrection, consolidating it, moving through it, and then planning for its aftermath, putting in place something new, establishing a different set of social institutions and social relations in lieu of the old oppressive ones. (Simultaneous equations, we might remember, are equations between two unknowns, unknowns that must be solved at the same time.) This dual conundrum has preoccupied revolutionaries and revolutionary thought since time immemorial. Walter Benjamin plotted the revolution in his own head, even while especially while he lurched toward his shadow figure, Blanqui, the man of action, the arch-conspirator who spent thirty of his seventysix years on earth in various French gaols. Blanqui was everything Benjamin wasnt: practical, fearless, ruthless. His very raison dtre was organization, plotting and propagandizing for the insurrection. Blanqui, Marx said, was the head and soul of the French workers movement. But Blanqui satisfies only the first part of that revolutionary simultaneous equation. The activities of a professional conspirator like Blanqui, Benjamin says, certainly do not presuppose any belief in progress they merely presuppose a determination to do away with present injustice. This firm resolve to snatch humanity at the last moment from the catastrophe looming at every turn is characteristic of Blanqui more so than any other revolutionary politician of the time. He always refused to develop plans for what comes later. Blanqui dreamed of a worldwide league of revolutionary communists. He tried to put that dream into reality, countenancing conspiracy as one method for instigating insurrection. Blanquis communism was an eclectic mix of Marxism avant la lettre and heterodox anarchism, of trying to consummate the revolutionary hopes begun in 1789, yet which ended in Thermidorian backlash. Blanqui couldnt adjust himself to an organization of huge dimensions, Samuel Bernstein says in Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection (1971). It rendered absurd his strategy of insurrection; and it placed in the foreground the working class which he had never regarded as a key propeller of history. Blanquis political organization was limited in size, Bernstein says, tightly pulled together, hierarchical in structure; made like a seamless garment, programmatically homogeneous, disciplined, obedient and ready to move. Blanquis insurrection was vertically organized yet spread itself out horizontally, immanently entering daily life, not so much a factory struggle as an urban war, a civil war rooted above all else or below all else in the street. The key organizing medium for Blanquists was the Society of the Seasons, formed in the 1830s when Marx was still a freshfaced lad. The society met clandestinely; leaders went unseen; meetings recruited foot soldiers whod form an army of revolt, ready for action violent action. The Societys network barely

One of the recurrent gripes about the movement weve come to call Occupy has been its failure to conceive a plan of action, a concerted strategy during its insurrection. There wasnt and still isnt any strategic campaign, critics say, no coordination between particular occupations, no sense of how to amalgamate and channel all that anger and dissatisfaction into a singular, unified oppositional force one that can stick around over the long haul. The most recent salvo is Thomas Franks in The Baffler magazine: With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. The process is the message... Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the world. What comes next after the insurrection, after the good guys have assumed power, or even when theyre still trying to wrestle against power? iek has been vocal here: carnivals are cheap, he says. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? Egypt, as a case in point, is still feeling the heat of a successful insurrection from two years ago. These two questions are intimately related and form part and parcel of the same revolutionary simultaneous equation:

AND WERE GOING TO HAVE SOME FUN IN FRONT OF EVERY ONE OF THEM!

Pull out and post all over

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kalle Lasn EDITOR-AT-LARGE Micah White SENIOR EDITORS Darren Fleet, Stefanie Krasnow ASSOCIATE EDITOR andrea bennett CREATIVE DIRECTOR Pedro Inoue ART DIRECTOR Ellen Lee FRONT-END DEVELOPER Abdul Rehman Khewar WEB DEVELOPER Karim Ratib WEB ENGINEER Jeremy Teale
CIRCULATION MANAGER Ben Rawluk INTERNS Wendee Lang, Kyle Robertson, Dugan Nichols, Barbara Matthews, Meaghan MacAneeley VOLUNTEERS Kevin Estrada, Mike Rae, Allison Thompson PUBLISHERS Kalle Lasn, Bill Schmalz NEWSSTAND SERVICES : Disticor PRINTING: Quad Graphics EMAIL: editor@adbusters.org, artdirector@adbusters.org, campaigns@adbusters.org, subscriptions@adbusters.org TELEPHONE tel: (604) 736-9401 toll-free: (800) 663-1243 POST 1243 West 7th Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6H 1B7 Canada
For reprint permission, contact reprints@adbusters.org. Portions of the magazine may be photocopied for educational purposes. Adbusters magazine is published by Adbusters Media Foundation. GST# R127330082, ISBN/ ISSN 0847-9097. Copyright 2012 by Adbusters Media Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the USA. Every care has been taken to trace copyright holders for images and text in this issue. However, if we have omitted anyone we apologize and will, if informed, make corrections.

stretched beyond Paris; but its covert nature of cells unnerved the powers that be and meant the Society punched above its weight, or at least threatened to. In Blanquis time, these Society of the Seasons were the revolutionary Jacobin clubs forty years down the line. Blanqui may have disagreed; in his early career he admired the Incorruptible Jacobin, Robespierre, but later claimed he was really a Hbertist, a descendent of the radical eighteenth-century journalist JacquesRen Hbert. Blanqui knew, just as Robespierre knew, just as any revolutionary today must know, that if an insurrection were to succeed, it would have to muster support from the faubourgs, from the banlieues, from the peripheral hinterlands. Revolutionaries nowadays need to establish cells in the banlieues, cells within urban cells, such that revolutionary activity can flow through the capillaries and arteries of our global urban fabric, through its physical and fiberoptic infrastructure, through its hardware and thoughtware. These secret cells must plot to stymie the dominant flow of things and will likely be spearheaded by professional organizers and tacticians, by black blocer anarchists, by socialists and autonomous communists of different stripes and persuasions, by anonymous rookies, by those whove never yet been politically active, by young casseurs and voyous, by everybody who, with Occupy and the Arab Spring, with the revolt in the banlieues, with the ongoing civil war everywhere, with growing unemployment, have found some medium to channel and refract their energies and dissatisfactions. Perhaps theres a neo-Jacobinism blowing in wind, not quite bawling out but certainly getting whispered, a revival of Jacobin values with its great desire to abolish slavery in our urban neocolonies, to denounce aristocratic plenty and root for sans-culotte empowerment. The Jacobin club was founded on the eve of Revolution, in a Dominican convent on the Seines Right Bank, along rue Saint-Honor. Meetings there were secret debating societies, made up of left-leaning deputies, republican enemies of the monarchy whod push for the constitution of 1791. The club bore the noble label Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality. Later

it opened its membership to small storeowners and artisans. Over 5,000 clubs operated throughout France; pamphlets and newspapers got published; rallies and processions organized. After the fall of the monarchy, Robespierre led the Jacobins in the National Convention. But the revolutionary fervor of the Jacobins came through its popularism, through the support of the sans-culottes. Those beings, a 1793 archive says, who go everywhere on foot, who at no point have millions in the bank, nor a chateau, nor valets at their beck and call; who lodge simply and at night present themselves to their section ... applying all their force to pulverize those who come from that abominable faction of stately men. And those stately men, the aristocrats? Theyre the rich, another 1793 document says, all those fat merchants, all the monopolizers, the mountebanks, the bankers, all the swindlers and all those who have something. Sound familiar? Just like Goldman Sachs, in fact. And a Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality, a neo-Jacobin radicalism today thats as organized and offensive as its namesake from the 1790s? Why not? This time, though, such a society would need to be popular, to have its doors open to all types of sans-culottes, and all genders. Meeting halls, debating chambers and political networks might be less grandiose: in cafs and on street corners, at youth centers, in university classrooms, anywhere where young people hang out. Dialogue might be online as well as face-to-face; a society of friends puts another egalitarian spin on Facebook camaraderie. But lets be clear: secrecy would be paramount in these meetings, certainly initially, given how the forces of law and order mercilessly cracks down on all subversive politicking. Weve heard about how the FBI infiltrated Occupy Wall Street (OWS), tracked known activists and student radicals, even on college campuses. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), a US watchdog civil rights group, recently blew the whistle when they obtained FBI documents: from its inception, PCJF say, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat. FBI offices and agents, were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a

month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country. And in France, especially in the banlieues, the Brigade AntiCriminalit (BAC), overtly and covertly, has intensified special police units patrolling les zones sensibles. As Mathieu Rigouste writes in La Domination Policire, the generalization of the BAC in urban territories is one of the decisive stamps of the counter-insurrectional restructuring of the police. If anything, austerity these days has become a veritable 9/11 in Europe: a watchword, for neoliberal governments to quieten any dissenting voice. In Greece, where austerity has been most brutally implemented, centers of lawlessness have been nipped in the bud. Early this past January, two longstanding occupied social centers in Athens, Villa Amalias and Skaramanga, with over 100 makeshift residents, were evicted. Former denizens were promptly arrested in a relentless police war of attrition, Operation Zeus, against all those outside the dominant orthodoxy, including undocumented migrants. In Al Jazeera, Antonis Vradis reports from the frontline: The eviction of Villa Amalias and the forthcoming police operation, Vradis says, reveals what is an inescapable contradiction in the reformulation of power in the Greek territory: In its short-term quest for stability, it is accelerating long-term social and political change. Against such short-term desperation for stability comes, then, an urgent and accelerated need for social and political change. Any Jacobin revival has to take us into and through the insurrection; and it has to leave us with something to build upon on the other side, in the aftermath. Which leads us to the second part of our revolutionary simultaneous equation. One of the amazing things Eric Hazan points out in Une histoire de la Rvolution Franaise, his fresh take on the French Revolution is how quickly it all happened, how fast an immense and deeply entrenched power structure and administration evaporated, caved in, without warning nor transition. Hazan details the spirit of the Jacobin club: the Society and its affiliates functioned as a system of diffusion of radical ideas. Nothing is more absurd than the notion of Jacobinism as an authoritarian Parisian dictatorship. Thats a fabrication inherited from the [counter-revolutionary] Thermidor, which endures along with a hatred of the Revolution. Hazan devotes memorable, generous lines to the National Convention, the first revolutionary assembly elected through universal (male) suffrage. Was the Convention representative of the people? he asks. If considered as an electoral system, which is to say, as a system of participatory democracy, then clearly not. Yet the virtues of the Convention, and its suggestive, enduring visionary politics, came and might still come through an altogether different means. To be sure, the Convention is still

unprecedented in how it allowed ordinary people to intervene in its sittings. That ordinary citizens and not a few sans-culottes could pass through the hollowed gates of Parliamentary politics was remarkable then and almost unthinkable now. Although the Conventions Salle du Mange was limited in size, it did manage to receive three thousand citizens at any one time. At tribunals, says Hazan, ordinary folk didnt hesitate to noisily speak out their opinion; deputies were forced to respond on the spot and were directly answerable to peoples plain outspokenness, to interrogation from their constituents. Alongside this popular participation, sittings of the Convention kicked off by listening to peoples letters, often voicing long commentaries on deputies propositions, offering suggestions, sympathetic encouragement, angry critique. In this regard, concludes Hazan, the Convention is the first and only national assembly where the people had been able to have their voice directly heard. So a message rings out, loud and jarringly: what an insurrection needs to do is force those Parliamentary doors open, smash them down if necessary, so that the people gain access. Not so much a participatory government as the chance for a real representative assembly, one in which elected politicians, for the first time in centuries, would actually be responsive to their electorate, engaging with them within an open democratic structure. Theyd be answerable, in other words, to the populace not to the usual powerful suspects. But how to keep counter-revolutionary economic and political interests at bay, how to justifiably shut them out of any new Convention, how to ruthlessly shut them out if necessary? The theme of violence inevitably enters the scene, the idea that theres a legitimate violence responsive to the everyday violence initiated by the forces of law and order, from its judiciary to its paramilitary, from its surveillance and containment to the outright wars it wages against people its power base doesnt like. War, from this standpoint, is a just-in-case response, a strikefirst-ask-questions-later initiative, a branch of democracy that needs to construct its own inconceivable foe: terrorists. Guy Debord confirmed as much back in 1988: Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. People must certainly never know everything about terrorism, says Debord, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable. More than two hundred years after Robespierres execution, an ideological logic lives on in governments around the world, one that defiles the Jacobin legacy, panders to a revisionist, right-wing Thermidorian telling of the truth. Robespierre was a bloody tyrant, a fanatical monster, a terrorist butcher. And yet, as Eric Hazan maintains, Robespierre took positions of great coherence and astonishing courage positions where he

INDIGNADOS - ZAPATISTAS - YA BASTA! - PUSSY RIOTERS - #KILLCAPPERS

was always a minority and sometimes absolutely alone: against suffrage censitaire [census suffrage], for civic rights, against martial law, against slavery in the colonies, against the death penalty, for the right to petition, for the freedom of the press In what country, in what assembly, have we ever heard so much contre-courant argument declared with such force of conviction? Robespierre was defiled, still is defiled, because what he said threatened ruling class privilege, upset their status quo; to defile him thus serves to tarnish every future hope of revolution, of future social change. I was born to fight crime, he says in a final speech from 1794. The time has not arrived for men of substance to be able to serve their homeland with impunity; defenders of liberty will be outlaws, for as long as the horde of scoundrels predominates. Lets get a neo-Jacobin movement going that can contest the horde of scoundrels who still predominate. Lets stand up to their arsenal and their ideologues. Lets loosen the grip those financial mountebanks and swindlers have on our society. Lets organize a concerted insurrection one that knows what its fighting for as well as against. But to do so we need visionaries as well as agitators, conspirators like Blanqui but also leaders like Robespierre, people with big plans and grand convictions outlaw mathematicians who know, perhaps more than anything else, all about revolutionary simultaneous equations.

#KILLCAPPERS - PIRATES - MEME WARRIORS - BLUES - GREENS - BLACKS - OCCUPIERS - YA BASTA!

PIRATES - IDLE NO MORE - JAZZERS - CULTURE JAMMERS - INDIGNADOS - ZAPATISTAS - YA BASTA!

Andy Merrifield is an independent scholar based in the UK. He has written several books including a biography of Situationist philosopher Guy Debord. His most recent books are Magical Marxism (2011) and John Berger (2012). Email: andy. merrifield@o2.co.uk.

At the moment, the planet might seem more poised for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to a better world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes were going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on the collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.

David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement

Deanna Budgell

TIQQUNISTAS - ANARCHOS - OCCUPIERS - YA BASTA! - PUSSY RIOTERS

GOLDMAN SACHS HAS 73 OFFICES WORLDWIDE...

AND WERE GOING TO HAVE SOME FUN IN FRONT OF EVERY ONE OF THEM!
Goldman Sachs, the most powerful and unrepentant of the financial fraudsters, has 3 offices in Canada and 4 in the United Kingdom; 8 in China; 2 separate locations in Madrid and 19 scattered across the United States. #GOLDMAN is an indefinite realtime, live-action game to shut down each of these locations. Points will be awarded for speed, spectacle, courage and innovation. We take everything we learned from Cairo, Madrid and Zuccotti combine it with the lessons of Quebec, Pussy Riot and Idle No More and turn #GOLDMAN into a global moment of truth for justice.