For more than fifteen years, popular uprisings have swept across the globe: from Tunisia to Chile, from Sudan to Lebanon, from Syria to France, from Iran to Sri Lanka. Despite the diversity of their contexts, these revolts have often stumbled upon the same obstacles: repression, co-optation by institutions, fragmentation of the struggles, and difficulty in transforming the momentum of the uprising into lasting popular power.
The manifesto Revolutions of Our Time, spearheaded by the Les Peuples Veulent network, offers an ambitious reflection on this historical period. Drawing on the direct experiences of participants in numerous contemporary uprisings, it seeks to distill strategic lessons and sketch the contours of a new “bottom-up” internationalism—based on horizontal mutual aid rather than top-down solidarity, and on building transnational links between popular powers rather than on the geopolitics of blocs.
At the Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop, we do not necessarily share all the analyses or conclusions of the text. In particular, we believe that the question of democratic institutions—the commune, the confederation, long-term political reconstruction—deserves further exploration, as does the relationship between social domination and the domination of nature, which lies at the heart of our own approach. We also regret the absence of an anti-economic perspective: moving beyond market logic and the economy as an autonomous sphere seems to us inseparable from any radical emancipation, whereas the manifesto criticizes capitalism without questioning economic categories themselves. But we consider this text to be a serious contribution to contemporary debates on popular revolts, popular power, and possible paths toward radical social transformation.
We invite you to read it as food for thought, discussion, and collective critique.
Link to the text: Revolutions of Our Times – Internationalist Manifesto
For more than fifteen years, popular uprisings have swept across the globe: from Tunisia to Chile, from Sudan to Lebanon, from Syria to France, from Iran to Sri Lanka. Despite the diversity of their contexts, these revolts have often stumbled upon the same obstacles: repression, co-optation by institutions, fragmentation of the struggles, and difficulty in transforming the momentum of the uprising into lasting popular power.
The manifesto Revolutions of Our Time, spearheaded by the Les Peuples Veulent network, offers an ambitious reflection on this historical period. Drawing on the direct experiences of participants in numerous contemporary uprisings, it seeks to distill strategic lessons and sketch the contours of a new “bottom-up” internationalism—based on horizontal mutual aid rather than top-down solidarity, and on building transnational links between popular powers rather than on the geopolitics of blocs.
At the Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop, we do not necessarily share all the analyses or conclusions of the text. In particular, we believe that the question of democratic institutions—the commune, the confederation, long-term political reconstruction—deserves further exploration, as does the relationship between social domination and the domination of nature, which lies at the heart of our own approach. We also regret the absence of an anti-economic perspective: moving beyond market logic and the economy as an autonomous sphere seems to us inseparable from any radical emancipation, whereas the manifesto criticizes capitalism without questioning economic categories themselves. But we consider this text to be a serious contribution to contemporary debates on popular revolts, popular power, and possible paths toward radical social transformation.
We invite you to read it as food for thought, discussion, and collective critique.
Link to the text: Revolutions of Our Times – Internationalist Manifesto