EDWARD SAID (1935-2003). Palestinian-born intellectual and world-famous literary critic. Author of 'Orientalism' and 'The Question of Palestine'. Professor of English Literature at Columbia University, NYC until his death. From the BBC series 'Exiles'.

Source: https://youtu.be/7g1ooTNkMQ4

Ruken Isik in conversation with Sinam Sherkany Mohammad, Meghan Bodette, and Elif Genc. Organized by UNC Charlotte Women and Gender Studies, April 15, 2021. Isik is a Kurdish-American researcher and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work focuses on Kurdish Women’s Activism in Turkey, Syria, and in the diaspora. Bodette received a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, where she concentrated in international law, institutions, and ethics. She directs the Missing Afrin Women Project, Genc is a PhD student in politics at the New School for Social Research and adjunct professor at St. John's University and Marymount College in New York. She is also an activist in the Kurdish women's freedom movement in Canada and the United States. Mohammad is Representative of the Syrian Democratic Council to the United States and has served as the European representative of the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava and co-chair of Rojava's Democratic Society Movement. Kurds are the world’s largest nation without a state to call their own -- some 35 million people spread across parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syrian and Iran, not to mention the diaspora. They have suffered severe repression and even genocide in all those countries and have been fighting for independence and liberation for generations. Kurdish military units, several of which are led by women, have also led the fight against ISIS in recent years. Since 2012 Kurds have conducted a radical experiment in self-governance in the northern region of Syria called Rojava, which borders Turkey. They have created a decentralized economy, known as a Democratic Confederacy, based on the principles of radical democracy, social ecology, and feminism. With the complicity of the U.S. government, Turkey invaded Rojava and other parts of the region in October 2019.

Source: https://youtu.be/wfPf1-GL71c

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the biggest urban uprising and experience of self-organization of modern history. For those engaged in social and political change, this historic experience stands as the first example of the exercise of social and political power by the working class and underclass. To this day, it remains a vibrant and inspiring example of direct democracy and women emancipation all over the world. This webinar organized by the Transnational Institute of Social Ecology (TRISE) brings together notable speakers who will articulate the lessons from the past and the opportunities today to move communities into a period of fundamental change. Such analysis and insights hopefully will help our societies to avoid going back to “business as usual” after the Covid-19 crisis and create new paths toward collective emancipation. Speakers and Chair: Magali Fricaudet is Coordinator of the UCLG Committee on Social Inclusion, Participatory Democracy and Human Rights. She is an active member of the Transnational Institute of Social Ecology and will be the Chair of the webinar. Mitchell Abidor is a translator and writer of several books. Among his books are Communards: The Paris Commune of 1871 as told by Those Who Fought for It (MIA Publications, 2010) and Voice of the Paris Commune (PM Press, 2015). His talk will focus on the Commune itself, between myth and reality. Dimitri Roussopoulos is the founder of the radical publishing house Black Rose Books. He is the author of several books including Political Ecology; Beyond Environmentalism (Black Rose Books, 1993) and The Rise of Cities (Black Rose Books, 2012). His talk will present the link between the Commune's ideas and practices to its significance today. Théo Rouhette is a social ecologist and activist. He is an active member of Transnational Institute of Social Ecology. His talk will present the current influence of the Commune imaginary in French social movements and municipalism. Anna Kowarsch is an activist and member of the Jineolji Academy in Rojava. Her talk will discuss women's autonomous organising in the context of building up communal structures of peoples' self-administration in Rojava.

Source: https://youtu.be/8aT46sKRNJ8

Abolish Restaurants is a beautifully illustrated guide to the daily misery, stress, boredom, and alienation of restaurant work, as well as the ways in which restaurant workers fight against it.

Drawing on a range of anti-capitalist ideas as well as a heaping plate of personal experience, it is part analysis and part call-to-arms.

Source: https://youtu.be/XLBzvugrmqc

Original: https://libcom.org/files/abolish-restaurants.pdf

Text only: https://libcom.org/library/abolish-restaurants

A long time ago, on a vast plateau in central France, I was helping some friends build a wooden house. The spring of 2013 had just arrived, the air was getting warm, and the snow from a few weeks earlier had been replaced by rain. We were in the middle of digging holes for the foundation, an thwarted by large chunks of pure granite. In between sessions with the jack-hammer, we’d swing our picks and chip away at the crumbling boulders buried beneath the wet earth. We talked about many things while we worked and eventually reached the subject of contemporary nihilism. All of us had been critiqued by nihilists for a variety of reasons with our efforts labeled as social, liberal, positivist, or reformist. In particular, my French friends had been accused of “entering retirement” with their cabins on the plateau. Just as this fact was relayed to me, the clouds broke open and allowed the sunlight to hit our faces. Before anyone could speak, two rainbows appeared no more than twenty feet away, towering over our holes in the ground. All we could do was laugh in joy, because these don’t just happen. Shortly after this, we began to discuss the Imaginary Party and its implications for the future of struggle.

My friend claimed that of all the theoretical concepts expounded in the works of Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, the idea of the Imaginary Party remained obscure for both its French and North American audience. Despite its centrality to their entire body of work, the Imaginary Party has never been examined beyond a few cursory paragraphs. While the The Call, Theory of Bloom, Theory of the Young-Girl, This is Not a Program, The Coming Insurrection, To Our Friends, Now, and Introduction to Civil War have been canonized by both the academic and radical press, the Theses on the Imaginary Party have been consistently ignored, especially in the United States, a place where the text has the most practical relevance.

When the great insurrectionary wave hit the US in 2008, multiple constellations of rebels had already read these French texts and were implementing some of their concepts into a lived praxis. Most of the theories and formulations in Tiqqun remained incomprehensible to their US readers, often dismissed as jargon-laden precursors to simpler texts like The Call and The Coming Insurrection. Oddly enough, despite constant criticism, it was the Theses on the Imaginary Party that had the most influence on anarchist praxis in the US between 2008 and 2010. Of all the ideas emerging from France, these were clearly the most practical.

Two projects emerged in those heady days that were influenced by the Theses of the Imaginary Party and helped shape insurgent thought in North America: the blog Social Rupture and the print-publication Fire to the Prisons. Both were started by extremely rebellious people who saw the true content of modern revolt contained not within the static mobilizations and spectacles of the the Left, but in the everyday ruptures of capitalist normality. According to their viewpoint, these common rebellions were constant, uncatalogued, and rendered invisible by the State to prevent their methods from contaminating the population. By exposing their daily occurrences, these editors hoped to reveal that the source of our strength existed not in the political heavens above, but in the insurgent underworld below. Social Rupture went silent around 2010, although by then riots had already spread across the United States in response to police shootings. When the last issue of Fire to the Prisons was released in 2015, the first coordinated prisoner strike had taken place and a national uprising against the police changed the course of history. At this point, you might be asking yourself, what do all these riots and uprisings have to do with the Imaginary Party? The simple answer? Everything!

(Introduction by It's Going Down, https://itsgoingdown.org/a-complete-idiots-guide-to-the-imaginary-party/#:~:text=The%20Theses%20on%20the%20Imaginary%20Party%20was%20originally%20published%20in,volume%20of%20the%20Tiqqun%20journal.&text=The%20concept%20of%20the%20Imaginary,the%20Imaginary%20Party%20(II).)

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5OBpfGXqZA&list=PLaWJ7Fi-UEM80jT_IjCDfVMcvmpwf8t1v&index=3

A long time ago, on a vast plateau in central France, I was helping some friends build a wooden house. The spring of 2013 had just arrived, the air was getting warm, and the snow from a few weeks earlier had been replaced by rain. We were in the middle of digging holes for the foundation, an thwarted by large chunks of pure granite. In between sessions with the jack-hammer, we’d swing our picks and chip away at the crumbling boulders buried beneath the wet earth. We talked about many things while we worked and eventually reached the subject of contemporary nihilism. All of us had been critiqued by nihilists for a variety of reasons with our efforts labeled as social, liberal, positivist, or reformist. In particular, my French friends had been accused of “entering retirement” with their cabins on the plateau. Just as this fact was relayed to me, the clouds broke open and allowed the sunlight to hit our faces. Before anyone could speak, two rainbows appeared no more than twenty feet away, towering over our holes in the ground. All we could do was laugh in joy, because these don’t just happen. Shortly after this, we began to discuss the Imaginary Party and its implications for the future of struggle.

My friend claimed that of all the theoretical concepts expounded in the works of Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, the idea of the Imaginary Party remained obscure for both its French and North American audience. Despite its centrality to their entire body of work, the Imaginary Party has never been examined beyond a few cursory paragraphs. While the The Call, Theory of Bloom, Theory of the Young-Girl, This is Not a Program, The Coming Insurrection, To Our Friends, Now, and Introduction to Civil War have been canonized by both the academic and radical press, the Theses on the Imaginary Party have been consistently ignored, especially in the United States, a place where the text has the most practical relevance.

When the great insurrectionary wave hit the US in 2008, multiple constellations of rebels had already read these French texts and were implementing some of their concepts into a lived praxis. Most of the theories and formulations in Tiqqun remained incomprehensible to their US readers, often dismissed as jargon-laden precursors to simpler texts like The Call and The Coming Insurrection. Oddly enough, despite constant criticism, it was the Theses on the Imaginary Party that had the most influence on anarchist praxis in the US between 2008 and 2010. Of all the ideas emerging from France, these were clearly the most practical.

Two projects emerged in those heady days that were influenced by the Theses of the Imaginary Party and helped shape insurgent thought in North America: the blog Social Rupture and the print-publication Fire to the Prisons. Both were started by extremely rebellious people who saw the true content of modern revolt contained not within the static mobilizations and spectacles of the the Left, but in the everyday ruptures of capitalist normality. According to their viewpoint, these common rebellions were constant, uncatalogued, and rendered invisible by the State to prevent their methods from contaminating the population. By exposing their daily occurrences, these editors hoped to reveal that the source of our strength existed not in the political heavens above, but in the insurgent underworld below. Social Rupture went silent around 2010, although by then riots had already spread across the United States in response to police shootings. When the last issue of Fire to the Prisons was released in 2015, the first coordinated prisoner strike had taken place and a national uprising against the police changed the course of history. At this point, you might be asking yourself, what do all these riots and uprisings have to do with the Imaginary Party? The simple answer? Everything!

(Introduction by It's Going Down, https://itsgoingdown.org/a-complete-idiots-guide-to-the-imaginary-party/#:~:text=The%20Theses%20on%20the%20Imaginary%20Party%20was%20originally%20published%20in,volume%20of%20the%20Tiqqun%20journal.&text=The%20concept%20of%20the%20Imaginary,the%20Imaginary%20Party%20(II).)

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUeJx7lbSfs&list=PLaWJ7Fi-UEM80jT_IjCDfVMcvmpwf8t1v&index=2

A long time ago, on a vast plateau in central France, I was helping some friends build a wooden house. The spring of 2013 had just arrived, the air was getting warm, and the snow from a few weeks earlier had been replaced by rain. We were in the middle of digging holes for the foundation, an thwarted by large chunks of pure granite. In between sessions with the jack-hammer, we’d swing our picks and chip away at the crumbling boulders buried beneath the wet earth. We talked about many things while we worked and eventually reached the subject of contemporary nihilism. All of us had been critiqued by nihilists for a variety of reasons with our efforts labeled as social, liberal, positivist, or reformist. In particular, my French friends had been accused of “entering retirement” with their cabins on the plateau. Just as this fact was relayed to me, the clouds broke open and allowed the sunlight to hit our faces. Before anyone could speak, two rainbows appeared no more than twenty feet away, towering over our holes in the ground. All we could do was laugh in joy, because these don’t just happen. Shortly after this, we began to discuss the Imaginary Party and its implications for the future of struggle.

My friend claimed that of all the theoretical concepts expounded in the works of Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, the idea of the Imaginary Party remained obscure for both its French and North American audience. Despite its centrality to their entire body of work, the Imaginary Party has never been examined beyond a few cursory paragraphs. While the The Call, Theory of Bloom, Theory of the Young-Girl, This is Not a Program, The Coming Insurrection, To Our Friends, Now, and Introduction to Civil War have been canonized by both the academic and radical press, the Theses on the Imaginary Party have been consistently ignored, especially in the United States, a place where the text has the most practical relevance.

When the great insurrectionary wave hit the US in 2008, multiple constellations of rebels had already read these French texts and were implementing some of their concepts into a lived praxis. Most of the theories and formulations in Tiqqun remained incomprehensible to their US readers, often dismissed as jargon-laden precursors to simpler texts like The Call and The Coming Insurrection. Oddly enough, despite constant criticism, it was the Theses on the Imaginary Party that had the most influence on anarchist praxis in the US between 2008 and 2010. Of all the ideas emerging from France, these were clearly the most practical.

Two projects emerged in those heady days that were influenced by the Theses of the Imaginary Party and helped shape insurgent thought in North America: the blog Social Rupture and the print-publication Fire to the Prisons. Both were started by extremely rebellious people who saw the true content of modern revolt contained not within the static mobilizations and spectacles of the the Left, but in the everyday ruptures of capitalist normality. According to their viewpoint, these common rebellions were constant, uncatalogued, and rendered invisible by the State to prevent their methods from contaminating the population. By exposing their daily occurrences, these editors hoped to reveal that the source of our strength existed not in the political heavens above, but in the insurgent underworld below. Social Rupture went silent around 2010, although by then riots had already spread across the United States in response to police shootings. When the last issue of Fire to the Prisons was released in 2015, the first coordinated prisoner strike had taken place and a national uprising against the police changed the course of history. At this point, you might be asking yourself, what do all these riots and uprisings have to do with the Imaginary Party? The simple answer? Everything!

(Introduction by It's Going Down, https://itsgoingdown.org/a-complete-idiots-guide-to-the-imaginary-party/#:~:text=The%20Theses%20on%20the%20Imaginary%20Party%20was%20originally%20published%20in,volume%20of%20the%20Tiqqun%20journal.&text=The%20concept%20of%20the%20Imaginary,the%20Imaginary%20Party%20(II).)

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRiglVLvUL0&list=PLaWJ7Fi-UEM80jT_IjCDfVMcvmpwf8t1v&index=2

Source: https://crimethinc.com/2021/05/20/instead-we-became-millions-inside-colombias-ongoing-general-strike

These are the essential writings of a man who inspired a new, egalitarian socialist regime in the Middle East, which is currently fighting for survival against religious extremism and state violence.

Source: https://youtu.be/zQfLs3kV4Gc