Resistance around the world

Of Latin origin, “resistare” is a military term meaning “to stop and face,” “to obstruct,” “to stand firm in one’s position.” Contrary to passivity or immobility, resistance is activity and movement in the face of an enemy and cannot be reduced to defense. It can become offensive when a struggle “against” turns into a struggle “for.”

But the origins of resistance can be found further back, in the first attempts at domination, starting with gender as the matrix of the new autocratic mode of social organization aimed at dislodging egalitarian societies, the matrilineal societies of yesteryear. And this was even before it became entrenched and structured by authoritarian social techniques aimed at subjugation recognized as legitimate by those concerned, until it reached its peak in today’s technocapitalism. From the outset, resistance is built through action in the face of injustice, inequality, intolerance, repression, and poverty in the political, social, economic, and religious spheres, as well as in various other areas, both private and public. The resulting action can be violent, armed, or non-violent, passive, expressed individually through committed and critical writing and artistic creation, but it only becomes fruitful when carried out through our collective actions within a movement. We do not know what we are capable of until we have experienced it collectively and emotionally, until we have pushed back the limits that are imposed on us to make us credulous and obedient. And through experience, these resistances around the world will endow us with a “desiring capacity” that sees struggles ‘against’ mutate into struggles “for.” Thus, resistance, this school of “doing things together,” will give us the ability to take back control of our lives, to reclaim local areas and forbidden territories, building new spaces conducive to creation, to the expression of freedom, and therefore to the self-institution of politics through direct democracy, all reinforced by international ties. This is the challenge and the stakes of communalism.