Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The crisis of global capitalism has given rise to a noxious wave of reactionary nationalism. From the UK and the EU to the US and across the world, authoritarian governments have taken power on the false promise of protecting "their own" citizens from the worst ravages of the system. But nation-states cannot provide lasting refuge from the catastrophic effects of global capitalism, from the threat of war to climate change and ecological catastrophe. A retreat to the nation-state will only deepen the impasse and lead to further crises. In this highly original manifesto, Susan Buck-Morss visualizes new transnational identities of solidarity that present new possibilities for revolutionary subjectivity. Recalling the utopian imaginaries generated by earlier revolutionary movements, Buck-Morss urges today's revolutionaries to envision and fight for a global community on the basis of transnational solidarity.
Synopsis
Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, "progress = modernization through industrialization," to which it has owed its political life?
Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and inclusive of difference--these are new forces being mobilized to make another future possible.
In a moving account that includes over 100 photos and images, Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands of grassroots movements to fight racial and gender violence, state-led terrorism, and capitalist exploitation of people and the planet worldwide. The twenty-first century has already witnessed unprecedented popular mobilizations. Unencumbered by old dogmas, mobilizations of opposition are not only happening, they are gaining support and developing a global consciousness in the process. They are themselves a chain of signifiers, creating solidarity across language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and every other difference.
Trans-local solidarities exist. They came first. The right-wing authoritarianism and anti-immigrant upsurge that has followed is a reaction against the amazing visual power of millions of citizens occupying public space in defiance of state power.
We cannot know how to act politically without seeing others act. This book provides photographic evidence of that fact, while making us aware of how much of the new revolutionary vernacular we already share.
Synopsis
Susan Buck-Morss highlights new forms of international solidarity and revolutionary subjectivity that can break the impasse of neoliberal capitalism and reactionary nationalism.