Lessons of 1917: For a Resurgence of Insurgent Dignity
Outrage & Agitation
Under Aleppo’s Rubble
By Taha Bali
Under Aleppo’s rubble, there is something for everyone to mourn.
For those who believe in peaceful and civil resistance tactics as a means for change: Aleppo was the city that produced the most significant and consequential student movement in the Syrian Revolution, and, in later days, it was the liberated areas in Aleppo that saw some of the most active anti-ISIS demonstrations and an effective, albeit contentious and imperfect, oversight from civil society and local governance bodies over military factions. None of this has ever been or will ever be allowed under the totalitarian Assad.Continue Reading
Necessary Trouble: “Organizers Will Create the Future”
Idealistisches Manifest
Meanwhile in Montenegro
Statement from a Comrade and Baltimore Native About the Uprising There
by Josh Baltimore for SIC
29 April 2015
I’m heading home in two days.
There is something very important happening not only in Baltimore, but across black America. As of now there have been no reported deaths at the hands of protesters in a city where 250 people are killed a year, nearly all of those homicide victims being black. In spite of the fires and the looting, the young people of Baltimore are still showing a greater restraint in their conflicts with police and store-owners than they have shown in their conflicts amongst each other. I say this because for years it has been my family too that has done some of the killing and much of the dying.
Why is it that the current uprising has, in spite of its violence, not tilted toward a shooting war between whites and blacks, cops and kids, landlords and tenants, bosses and workers, given the fact that the shooting war between young black men across the region is invariant? Because young black people still value the lives of their structural enemies more than they value their own. The engineering of what is possibly the most efficient self-cannibalizing social organism in history – the nightly shootouts, the stabbings, the overdoses – is a project that has been centuries in the making.Continue Reading
It Might Be Spring in Macedonia
AntiNote: This article/interview collage appeared last week on LeftEast immediately following an escalation in the student protests that began late last year in Macedonia. Reprinted with permission.
We find these events in Macedonia of particular interest for their largely unsung parallels to the more widely reported student movements and occupations happening in places like Chile, Quebec, London, and Amsterdam as well as the conditions currently being created (and also protested, here and there) in the United States.
It is also encouraging to see this kind of organizing and resistance occurring in a country that appeared, until recently, to understand itself as not having built a culture of political opposition since its independence (there may be hope for Switzerland yet!). The AWC extends our support and solidarity.
23 April 2015, Skopje
Spring has arrived in Macedonia: thousands of pupils and students protest against education policies
by Adela Gjorgjioska for LeftEast
23 April 2015
Thousands of pupils, students and teachers marched today across the country, in a renewed challenge to governmental education policies. Organized by the High School Plenum, the protest comes two months after the [University] Student Plenum declared victory against “reforms” in higher education on the 24th of February, 3 months after the students’ first march on the 17th of November.
“For the first time in the history of Macedonia, but also the region, students and professors will participate directly in the process of devising a law which affects them,” the Student Plenum exclaimed then. Continue Reading
