Transcribed from the 29 April 2026 episode of This Is Hell! Radio (Chicago) and printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Listen to the whole interview:
We’re going into a period of much more crisis and collapse, and I think we will see many more uprisings as a result. This is definitely a response to a failing civilization and multi-level problems. The question is, how do we organize to become stronger?
Chuck Mertz: The idea of empire has plagued humanity for centuries. Its exploitation and suffering has been interminable. The normalization of what should never have been normal, the tolerance for the intolerable, has gone on far too long. We can do better.
But how? The first step toward knowing is by learning from each other, around the world. Here to help us imagine another world that actually might be possible, we are very happy to have joining us Leila Al-Shami, a contributor to Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto, which was written collectively by The Peoples Want, as well as Benjamin from the Syndicate of Limousine Mountain and member of The Peoples Want living in Tarnac, France.
First, welcome back to This Is Hell!, Leila.
Leila Al-Shami: Hi, it’s nice to be back here. Thanks for having us.
CM: It’s great to have you on the show. And welcome to This Is Hell!, Benjamin.
So Leila, let’s start with you. You and your collective wrote, “The process of writing this text began in the summer of 2023. It consisted of nine people from different parts of the world—Lebanon, France, Syria, Russia, Tunisia, Chile, Kurdistan, and Iran—coming together to establish a first draft, nine contributors who each in their own way had taken part in the uprisings of our time.”
So let’s just ask a very general question here at the beginning, Leila. Why is that international perspective so important? Why is it so important to get out of your bubble, of your local or national group? Why is that international context so important?
LS: The manifesto was a response to the wave of revolutionary uprisings that began in around 2010. There was a big wave with the Arab Spring, anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain, and the Occupy movement; and another large wave in 2018-2019, in places like Chile, Hong Kong, Iraq, Lebanon. So the manifesto was an attempt of people to come together to share their experiences and share their learnings, and that’s how The Peoples Want began. It began as a series of international gatherings in 2018, people coming to ask these questions of what internationalism could look like in the twenty-first century.
The text is us putting down those learnings to share with a wider audience.
CM: You mention all these different uprisings that have taken place. Do you believe that over the past thirty years, we have been in an era of continued and repeated uprisings against neoliberalism and austerity? Or are these uprisings not as much about being opposed to anything as they are about supporting an alternative?
Are we in an era of protest? And are these protests just against the problems that we have, or are they actually providing solutions?
LS: A bit of both. I do believe we’ve been through a massive period of revolutionary uprisings, and they shared a number of characteristics. They were against socio-economic injustice like you said, but also often against authoritarianism as well. They were interesting because they weren’t really defined by traditional ideologies; they were much more based in experiences of self-organization, building autonomy, building popular power.
And we saw the occupation of space become a key feature of those uprisings, whether it was university buildings, or in France the Yellow Vests took over roundabouts. In Syria, two thirds of the state was liberated from the regime, and people set up local councils in which they managed entire towns, for many years. This was a unique experience in many ways, and it was an experience which much of the left failed to adequately respond to.
CM: How does our view of the world change when we recognize our era, when we understand our time as one of continued and repeated uprisings around the world, and not one of stability and the imperial might of global superpowers?
We had a conversation a few years ago with an author [Vincent Brown] who talked about the four hundred years of chattel slavery—there were constant and repeated uprisings, rebellion after rebellion. With the way US history is taught in our primary schools, we are told that the era of slavery was an era of stability, when it never was.
So how does our view of the world change when we recognize our era as one of continued and repeated uprisings?
LS: We are in a period of increasing challenges and increasing instability; there are so many multi-level crises we’re facing. Part of that is a result of these revolutionary waves that we’ve had; it’s been part of the counterrevolution of authoritarian regimes gaining in power, fascism becoming much more dominant globally, and then of course all the crises to do with the ecological crisis that we’re facing.
We’re going into a period of much more crisis and collapse, and I think we will see many more uprisings as a result. Already in the past couple years we’ve had the Gen Z uprisings in Madascar and Morocco, in Nepal and Indonesia. This is definitely a response to a failing civilization and multi-level problems. The question is, how do we organize to become stronger?
Many of these waves of uprisings have been defeated. So we want to take that learning—what worked, what didn’t work, what were the successes, what were the failures, and how can we ensure that we’re not defeated in the revolutionary upheavals to come? But most importantly, how do we get out of this emergency-response mode we’re in, and start thinking about long-term strategies? That’s something that The Peoples Want is trying to do.
CM: Benjamin, following up on what Leila was saying about always being in a state of emergency response, The Peoples Wants writes that “the intensification of open warfare in Ukraine, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon—to mention only the most recent—and the reinforcement of the bloc logic this implies seemed a major obstacle. How could we not appear out of step when drawing up plans for a new internationalism at a time when bombs were going off everywhere?”
Is writing a manifesto for a revolution in any way a distraction from other forms of activism, including efforts to end war? Or can that process also encompass a peace movement as well? How can a revolution encompass not just the revolution itself, but also be an emergency response?
Benjamin: Thank you for the question, it’s been one of the main questions at the heart of the work in The Peoples Want over the last few years; the manifesto is just a moment of that. The move we wanted to impulse with the manifesto is to take a step back and look at the situation as a whole, and see in the current state of the world how we can develop a strategy in the long run, and stop running from one fight to another, stop being reactive to what’s happening on the other side.
The main step with this was to say, Let’s take a step back, look at the situation, share our analysis, and try not to fall into the easy way of relating to the situation. One of the main things we’ve been gathering around is how we cannot fall in the old scheme of considering the global situation as being a global fight between two camps, the camps of imperialism and the so-called “anti-imperialist” standing. This was fueled by people who were part of on-the-ground movements in Syria and Iran who wanted to refine the analysis on the side of revolutionaries.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get involved in movements against war. It means taking the stand differently. In this matter, for example, we now have very close comrades from Iran taking a strong stand against the imperialist intervention in Iran but staying on the side of the uprisings that happened over the last few years in Iran, and making a clear stand on that. Being against imperialist invasion wouldn’t be a stand for the regime, for example.
Much of the work we’ve been doing so far has been liaison work between different groups trying to refine their analysis and find new ways of acting on the situation. But mainly yes, you’re right, the work we’re doing now is looking at the medium/long run, and that means not being absent from the emergency response, but keeping time, space, and resources for organizing on the long run and not running all over to follow the reactionary actions.
Information is at the core of what we’re trying to do. The first step is making sure people who are involved and conscious are aware of the different struggles ongoing, and how the solidarity work can be organized, and money and resources can be channeled to the right places.
CM: Benjamin, let me follow up on that with you. In The Peoples Want manifesto they write, “If the avant gardes claim to be marching one step ahead of the masses, we know that we are marching one step behind the popular uprisings of recent years. We have grown in their wake, they were our best school. Now we want to weave the fabric of a generational experience. By generation, we mean that which connects all those regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or language, who have recognized the emergence of a new revolutionary cycle, and felt a tremor in the depth of their hearts and bodies.”
How can revolution be both universal and completely inclusive? Won’t there always be those who are opposed to and frightened by change, viewing it as a security risk? Does inclusivity necessarily mean assimilation into a dominant culture?
B: At the core of what we’re trying to do with The Peoples Want network, and the reflection we wanted to start with the manifesto is exactly this: how we don’t abandon a universal (or at least transnational) perspective of revolution that can be shared from very different situations, and at the same time not stamping on reality and making it flat to correspond to what we want it to be.
I don’t know if I would use the word “inclusivity.” Our main standing was to work from what comes out of the diversity of the margins, and how they challenge central powers and hierarchical dynamics. It’s an ongoing work; the manifesto was the first stone, and now there’s a process of encouraging, and finding the resources to allow, direct meeting between people from very different contexts so that we can refine together ethical and strategic positions that can be shared by as many people as possible, in terms of challenging central powers and authoritarian regimes.
We’re not trying to replace one universalism with another one, but we’re trying to find a method that allows us to understand each other, translate a position or context to one another, and work out revolutionary positions that are fit to our times, and not just recycle revolutionary positions from the last century which wouldn’t fit with what’s going on now.
CM: Leila, let’s get to what internationalism is. The Peoples Want writes, “None of the ideologies, none of the political roadmaps we’ve inherited is capable of grasping the tumult of our times. We have not sought to create new ones, but we do have a notion of the method that will enable us to find paths together. It’s called internationalism.”
What is meant by “internationalism?”
LS: I don’t know if you remember, but when I was on this radio show a decade ago, very involved in the struggle that was happening in Syria at the time, I was frustrated that so little of the left had responded in a positive way to Syria and given solidarity to what was happening in Syria. And the reason for that was because of this type of anti-imperialism that only sees Western powers such as the US as the enemy, and fails to take into account other imperialisms (such as Iran and Russia in the Syrian case), and fail to base solidarity on people and movements rather than states—everything was seen as part of a geopolitical struggle, which is something we see today in the response to Iran, and Venezuela.
We wanted to ask this question of how to build internationalism that was really based on people and movements, and how to build connections amongst ourselves, how to put solidarity into practice. At The Peoples Want, we’re talking about mutual aid, we’re talking about building strong connections amongst each other, and how to give practical support to each other. We don’t want to be a network that’s just putting out ideological statements, which is all a lot of the left is doing much of the time when it comes to international issues.
We want to find ways to support those who are in struggle, and be able to give them strength.
CM: Benjamin, earlier we were mentioning all the different uprisings that were taking place. But the majority of the [US] public may not be aware of many of the uprisings that are mentioned in your book, because our press does not report on—if it comes to an Indigenous uprising, they don’t report on Indigenous anything very often.
How much of an obstacle to revolution a simple lack of information? To what exptent does the public know about the uprisings taking place around them? And, having greater knowledge, would they support them?
B: That’s true for the broader public, but it’s even true for people on the left or revolutionaries themselves. Until recently, it was difficult to have access to information from on the ground in many different countries. There are historical struggles that are recognized by the left, like the Kurdish movement or the Palestinians or the Zapatistas, people usually know about that. But there are struggles and forms of revolutionary organization in so many different contexts and situations that we don’t know about.
Most people don’t know anything about what’s happening in Myanmar, for example, which is probably one of the most interesting situations of recent years in terms of revolutionary organizing, funding, and organizing a struggle against a state at a national scale. So yeah, information is at the core of what we’re trying to do.
Liaison work—the first step is making sure people who are involved and conscious are aware of the different struggles ongoing, and how the solidarity work can be organized, and money and resources can be channeled to the right places. The main work we’re doing is this, identifying the people on the ground with whom we can relate and build confidence relations, to find common agency on the situation; how we can identify the right way to act in such-and-such a situation.
In the long run, growth of public information is also on the agenda. But the first step is making sure that the liaison work is done in a proper way so that we’re conscious of the complexity of situations and what actors we can support in an effective way.
CM: Leila, The Peoples Want states, “Until now the centers of power have kept a firm grip on the horizon, confining each struggle, each uprising, to its particular context. Dominant figures in the centers cannot believe that anyone would want anything other than to join the center. The center is the best of all possible worlds, the rest of us can only run to catch up, collapse, get up again and hope one day to make it. The only world we have in common is the world as defined by the victors of so-called globalization. But when revolutionary eruption does occur, it gives rise to a different world in common that emerges from the ruins, cracks, and margins. This is the common world we need to name, born of revolt and free of the specifics of its various contexts.”
As we’ve cited several times since it happened at the February 2026 Munich security conference, US secretary of state Marco Rubio urged Western allies to renew their heritage, stating, “We do not seek to separate but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.”
I mean this partly tongue-in-cheek, but is the common world opposed to the greatest civilization in human history?
LS: What we certainly see is that the centers of power have come together to support each other. In the Syrian revolution, Russia and Iran intervened to support the Syrian regime; in Chile, Israeli cybersecurity and German police were sent to support the powers there. Our enemies have come together to defend their own power and interests. We all know their interests are totally opposed to our interests.
The question is how we can build our connections to become much stronger together. What we often find is that people are stuck in their own local struggles—obviously that consumes most of your energy—and people often feel very isolated. But actually we have much more in common than we think. The question is how to build those channels and networks where we can come together and where we are, actually, a power that can oppose this dominant civilization.
CM: Benjamin, do you think this kind of defensive stance of the centers of power—does that reveal, or is it a sign of weakness or precarity of power?
B: It would be awkward to affirm that as a general statement, but in many cases it was. The war logic and the intensification of state repression is always the sign of some kind of feverishness. But we’re not just saying that repressive states and warmongers are made of paper, or we’re not in a situation that’s dangerous. What we’re saying, what we’re trying to stress through the manifesto, is that most of the time we overlook our own power and think we’re more powerless than we actually are.
The main move we’re trying to do with this manifesto is help people recognize each other and recognize the correspondences between the different contexts we’re acting in, and rediscover the power we can have. That doesn’t mean undermining the power of the other camp, it’s fostering our own power. But it’s true that the intensification of the situation we are witnessing now has to do with some fear about stability, fear about the continuity of power, and we should see further than just the course of events that’s happening right now, and see how we can get out of this sequence stronger than we entered it, and not be hypnotized by the shock strategy that is being developed now.
The question we wanted to ask was how to sustain, so these structures which often emerge in a moment of uprising can also be working and building their strength in the moments where there isn’t an uprising.
CM: The manifesto states, “The incredible claim of the West to define a universal horizon for humanity has caused and justified millions of deaths; genocides, epistemicides, not to mention the enslavement and displacement of millions of people. What a macabre and effective intellectual swindle! The founding myth of the free subject forged and propagated by the Enlightenment was born in the context of a revolutionary struggle against tyranny.”
How is the free subject a myth? And what does it being born during a struggle against tyranny reveal about that myth?
B: The main standing of the manifesto is to reevaluate the effect of Eurocentric or occidental “universalism” on the world over the last fifty years, and how we should have a cruder analysis of this now, on the effect it had on the Global South, and distinguish the fact that the inheritance of a revolutionary period in Europe has been taken as the basis of a new world order doesn’t mean we undermine the revolutionary origin of it, but that we are very conscious that some discourses on human rights, for example, or the free subject, are today serving new strategies of imperialism and domination, and that we should have a clear stance on that.
We’re not just siding with the “free world” against the rest of the world, but we’re trying to weave the new lines of a new revolutionary offensive that has a different stance on this, that has a capacity for criticizing the side effects and the manipulations of the last few years.
CM: In The Peoples Want manifesto, it states, “Empire’s cynical use of the garb of human rights to establish itself as the universal judge of peace has not prevented human rights also being claimed as a discourse of resistance and a basis of support for popular struggles throughout the world. There is therefore a contradictory dual use of international law by the centers and by the margins. Indigenous or colonized people regularly use the right to self-determination as leverage in their struggle against national governments and occupying forces; human rights and their symbolic weight on the international stage regularly serve as a reference point for resistance to oppression on the ground, as a denunciation of state terrorism. But the lightning rod of international law offers little protection. It does not serve the interests of dominant powers.”
Do demands for human rights, Leila, via international law, lead to the normalization of international law—and the normalization of exclusion that needs to be overcome? Can there be a revolution when you are using the tools and strategies that are being risen up against? Can you use the master’s tools against themselves?
LS: That’s a very good question. It’s very clear today, if you take the case of Gaza, for example: the entire Western world, which is the world that talks about democracy and human rights, is completely complicit in supporting the Israeli state to carry out this devastating genocide in Gaza, which is now spreading to various other places in the region—to Syria, to Lebanon, and now to Iran. So it’s hypocrisy, isn’t it? Those in power promote one worldview that just doesn’t apply to the rest of us, or doesn’t apply in reality.
But I think human rights is still a very powerful discourse for people. The people in Gaza talk about their human rights all the time. They’re asking for self-determination. At the moment, that’s what the dominant discourse is. The question is really about the principles—who’s claiming those principles, and what we want to fight for.
In my view, if we come up with an alternative resistance narrative, it’s quite possible that it will be the case that states themselves will co-opt that narrative and try to distort it in a way which is unrecognizable for the people who started it. We see that with the ecological struggle: it started from people demanding better protection of the environment, different ways of organizing, but the way states now talk about environmentalism is totally divorced from what people themselves are asking for.
CM: Benjamin, The Peoples Want manifesto states, “From Syria to Ukraine, the spontaneous reaction of some revolutionaries and their supporters has been to regret the non-intervention of the ‘international community.’ But when intervention did occur, it was simply another way of extinguishing or neutralizing the revolutionary ‘threat.'”
Is international intervention by the international community about snuffing out revolutions that may challenge the international community’s power and control over the rest of the world? Is international intervention not about freedom or liberation, but about oppressing revolutionary movements?
B: This is a very important question at the moment. When we wrote the manifesto, we didn’t have such blatant examples as we have today. We were mainly speaking from the experience of what happened in Libya, for example, when there was a French and British intervention there, and the effects the foreign intervention had on the local context and the developing revolutionary movement on the ground.
The situation in Iran, for example, is really coming to this question now. Our comrades in the network from Iran are defending the position that the intervention is not helping their development of the revolutionary movement in Iran, nor any kind of popular cause on the ground. On the contrary, it’s reinforcing the repression of the state on the ground, and dividing the movement.
This question is a very picky one. In many different cases, intervention has been asked for because of the inequality of the forces on the ground and the need for a popular movement sometimes to take the path of armed struggle to resist oppression or annihilation. But in many cases, when we speak about the international community, it’s more had the effect of freezing the situation and preventing the revolutionary movement from finding its own way to change the situation—or even worse, coming to even more reactionary regimes following it.
This is a very current question, how we refine our analysis of this type of context and how we can defend more intelligent positions than just standing with the main powers leading the international community. It’s one of the main things we’re going to work on in the next years, how we can assert a revolutionary position on this.
CM: Leila, The Peoples Want manifesto also states, “To be dependent on the military capabilities of certains states or armed factions and see this as the only pracitical way contributing to the struggle is a sign of our resignation, and abandonment of the very possibility of revolution.”
What does it reveal about those who first, and possibly only, suggest sending arms as a way to support insurgencies? What does that reveal about their understanding of resistance?
LS: We recognize that often a need for armed struggle arises, unfortunately. That’s not coming from an ideological position, that’s coming from the reality of the situation on the ground. If you’re in a situation like people were in Syria, or people are in Palestine, and they’re facing genocide and absolute annihilation by the state, it’s normal that those people will take up arms to defend themselves, to defend their communities. And of course once weapons intervene, then they’re also depending on calling for international support to get the weapons and to continue their struggle.
We recognize that’s one tactic that often occurs. But what we need to ask ourselves—there’s so many problems with that. The minute weapons intervene in the situation, there are outside powers able to dictate and influence the movement; it empowers warlords; it often sidelines the civil struggle and particular groups within it, such as women. There are a lot of pitfalls to that approach.
So the question we’re asking is how to make sure that’s not the only realm of struggle, how to make sure that civil struggle is able to continue, other forms of organization can continue, and that the armed struggle doesn’t become the only domain and eclipses completely the community and people’s participation in determining the future they want.
CM: Benjamin, in The Peoples Want manifesto, it also states, “In an era of monolithic beliefs, differences are denied or crushed to suit a global system for managing resources, exchanges, and identities; a skillful interweaving of distinct but complementary systems of domination has turned us into subjects of an Empire that is constantly being modulated and extended. Changes in alliances, in the balance of power, and of capital cities are on the surface. Although there were pre-capitalist empires that predated the nation-state and were non-Western, the expansion of capitalism unified Empire into a single whole. Thus, Empire survived the official end of European colonial empires, became secularized, and succeeded in spreading a belief that no alternative is possible.”
How do we understand the world differently when we do not view empire as contained or constrained by only one state, but a practice performed by many in the international community? How do we view empire differently when we see it as a global condition and not a campaign limited by one nation?
The only places where you can still find collective lives and livelihoods that have managed to preserve spaces outside of capitalism’s domination is where people organize, defend themselves, and build popular power.
B: That’s an interesting question. It’s one of the things we’re trying to defend, even though in the recent period it’s been more difficult to defend this position because of the strong US offensive over the last few years. Our main stand was really to say that we can’t overlook other kinds of imperialism and how they’re connected between each other, even though they seem to compete or sometimes are at war. There is something like an international community of the dominants, and the dominants are helping each other in the long run, and they have many grounds where they try to make their interests converge.
This is always undermining the power of peoples, and gives way to more extractivism. Our main analysis is to say that even though people can speak about the fall of some parts of traditional Western imperialism, and even though they are getting more aggressive in this precise period, other kinds of imperialism are rising up and taking their place in the same world system. We would be mistaken in thinking there would be one empire, led by the United States, and then just people undergoing this imperialism and resisting it. We think there is a multi-centered system that works really well and that goes far beyond what we actually see in the news and the theaters of conflict existing today.
In the long run, there is a global system of domination that has to be fought from different places and by combining different analyses, and not being mistaken by this theory of the “main enemy” that is coming back a lot today.
CM: Leila, let’s talk about popular power, which is a very important aspect of The Peoples Want’s book on revolutions. The manifesto authors write, “The revolution we seek is neither the refusal of power nor its negation; that would mean perpetually leaving power in the hands of our adversaries. We cannot be content to always be a dam, a brake, an opposition—even permanent—to the domination of the centers. Popular power is, on the contrary, the active search and living construction of a collective way of forging a new legitimacy, of exercising a different kind of power.”
How sustainable is popular power in the face of state power? And how can popular power be exercised?
LS: To go back to what we were saying at the beginning, this wave of uprisings that’s ongoing—one of the really interesting things about it was the ways people built popular power, the forms of self-organization, the structures that were set up to sustain the revolutionary movement. But what we also saw was that when the uprising ended, or the counterrevolution became more dominant, many of these structures just dissolved, disintegrated. People went back to their homes.
So the question we wanted to ask was how to keep that going, how to sustain that so these structures which often emerge in a moment of uprising can also be working and building their strength in the moments where there isn’t an uprising. One, to build the relationships, but also to build a foundation for the next popular struggle that comes, so that it’s stronger in the future. It’s also to connect to each other.
One of the things we’re trying to do in The Peoples Want movement is build a network called “mujawara,” which is a word which means “neighboring” in Arabic. It’s a network of self-organized spaces, spaces that emerge during revolt, to connect them to each other and work together and be able to support each other. One of the things we’re doing in June is we’re having an international month of action for the mujawara network, which anyone can participate in—they don’t have to be a member of The Peoples Want. We’re asking people to organize anything in their communities around the theme of “Internationalism from Below,” and we’re hoping any funds raised from that will go towards the establishment of two new places: one for Sudanese revolutionaries, and one for revolutionaries in Syria.
Building popular power is really central to what we’re doing, and thinking about how we can keep that going long term.
CM: Benjamin, The Peoples Want manifesto quotes a Sudanese comrade saying, “Revolution has become a religion in Sudan.” What happens when revolution becomes a religion? Can faith in revolution make it sustainable?
B: Interesting that you quote this passage about the Sudanese revolution, because it’s one of the most interesting examples we have over the last few years. It’s at the same time a real disaster, with a very problematic humanitarian situation: eleven million refugees, a civil war that’s been lasting for four years. But the revolutionary movement there had probably one of the strongest achievements over the last few years, with a mass movement that was organized over more than twenty years and managed to topple the regime.
Now, the Sudanese diaspora is very impressive in the way they organized, even in exile, whether in east Africa or Europe or the United States, and they’re building on a long-running revolutionary tradition. This is giving a lot of hope for many of us who can’t find our way in the Western world, that Sudanese revolutionaries succeeded in doing such a thing: sustaining a strong revolutionary offensive in the long run, even in this most extreme context of civil war.
CM: Leila, you also write, “While these experiments are still threatened by many reactionary forces and face the authorities’ corruption, they have demonstrated their ability to take root and exists for decades. People power is the opposite of powerlessness; it means taking the time to climb the rungs of the ladder one by one, and not relying on those who want to capture our votes.”
How does this decisionmaking process work when it comes to popular power? How are differences overcome? How are they resolved? How are decisions made?
LS: It works differently in different struggles. We’ve seen that form of self-organization being the major form of organization, whether it’s in movements that happened in the US or in Asia, in the Middle East—people coming together and having those discussions collectively in their communities. But each model looks slightly different. We’re not trying to build one homogeneous way of doing things; we want to take the best from everybody’s experience and see how we can learn together.
CM: Benjamin, a few years ago we had a guest on, Raquel Varela, talking about the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, that did create autonomous communities—but they were eventually crushed by fascists. How often are revolutions snuffed out? How often does might make right when it comes to revolutions?
B: There’s a long story of revolutionary defeats behind us, but what we wanted to foster is that we have a long heritage of revolutionary experiences and that there’s always new experiences being developed in different places, and that the knowledge of this and the sharing of this, the building of a collective memory and strategic memory—not just a melancholy thing but how all these experiences can fuel a common understanding of our capacity and help us build towards new successes and victories in the long run.
This is one of the main things we want to do. We have to pull our energies and experiences together to build a new revolutionary force. That’s what we’re working at.
CM: Leila, you write, “Contrary to what ideologues, intellectuals, and prophets have always asserted, the answer is never absolute or eternal; it can only be momentary, provisional, situational, a glimmer of truth. We have sought to gather the scattered fragments, assemble and interrogate them to see what they might tell us about the future.”
Is attaining permanent revolution, and always being open to change and the unknown—is that the desired goal? To have permanent revolution?
LS: We always have to be prepared and ready for the moment of uprising, because it often comes at very unexpected moments. Sometimes there’s a long buildup, but often when the uprisings explode it’s something that happens very quickly—because of a case of police brutality or something like that. So we do have to be prepared, but what we don’t want is to be dogmatic or have one homogeneous view that we try and impose on a situation.
We have to let it come from the ground up, we have to listen to what the movement is telling us.
CM: The manifesto also states, “Storming palaces and parliaments came back into fashion with the uprisings of 2011. For many participants, the revolution meant the fall of the regime. But the hopes raised by the fall of governments in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Ukraine were short-lived: authoritarian or liberal takeovers, foreign intervention, economic crises, civil war. Removing tyrants is not synonymous with the victory of revolution.”
This might be a little bit redundant, but why is removing tyrants not enough? A lot of people in the United States believe that’s all you have to do.
LS: Removing a tyrant is often seen as the end goal, but what has often happened in many cases is new tyrants have replaced them. We’ve seen that very much with the latest revolutionary wave; the inheritors of that process have often been more reactionary, more extreme, or fascist of various stripes. So we have to start thinking about how to change the dominant structures of power, how to do that long term work that we can’t just place in the symbolic fall of a regime, however beautiful that may be.
Syria is a great example, getting rid of Bashar Al-Assad was a wonderful victory for the Syrian people, but there’s still a lot of work to do to build the democratic egalitarian society that Syrians went out to the streets demanding in 2011.
CM: Just to follow up on that, the manifesto also states, “We need to find a revolutionary horizon, not just in order to survive, but to live a life worth living.” Why is survival not enough? Why is a life with dignity and respect so important when it comes to our very survival?
LS: Because that’s what people are asking for. In all of these uprisings, the question of dignity has been a central issue for people. People don’t want to just have enough food to eat and that’s it. People want to live a life worth living—that’s such a human response.
CM: Benjamin, Richard Seymour was on our show in November, and he stated that capitalism is the precondition for fascism. Can popular power protect us from capitalism?
B: My very quick answer on this is, can we think of anything else? The state hasn’t been able to protect us. The only places where you can still find collective lives and livelihoods that have managed to preserve spaces outside of capitalism’s domination is where people organize and defend themselves and build popular power. It’s the only example I can think of if I look at recent history. If anybody has a better idea I’m ready to listen.
CM: Leila, the manifesto at one point states how the US version of democracy is a sham. How much is the United States an existential threat to the concept of democracy?
LS: It is a threat to the concept of democracy in the Arab world, which are the struggles I’m most involved in. The concept of Western democracy, what’s seen as liberal democracy, has been so discredited for the reasons we spoke about before: the US government has thought it could import democracy to these countries based on American tanks. But actually what we’ve seen in the uprisings in the region is that people have reclaimed the concept of democracy. It was popular democracy, it was self-organizing in local councils, in committees, in their different ways of organizing for the uprising.
So yes, I think a certain concept of liberal democracy is bring discredited, but other forms of democracy are coming from the bottom up.
CM: Thank you both for being on the show.
LS/B: Thank you so much.
