Spring Revolution in Myanmar
Songs, Symbols and Tattoos of Resistance
The civil war in Myanmar has been described as the longest running and one of the most violent conflicts in the world today. The country is synonymous with ethnic conflicts, brutal military repression and an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. But this book is not a formal history of the conflicts and human rights violations. It is a book which is a celebration of the spirit of defiance, resilience and enormous courage of the Burmese people in the face of extreme violence of the military regime. While the world looks away from Myanmar and the people face devastating humanitarian crisis the Burmese diaspora crowdfunding the armed resistance. This book gives a glimpse into the world of Burmese resistance and the myriad cultural expressions that the resistance has taken ever since the February 2021 coup. This is a resistance where every cultural form, poems, songs and even tattoos are weapons of resistance. The military regime has tried to ban songs, execute poets and musicians and persecuted artists. But as one poet Khet Thi (1786-2021) says “You try to bury us underground, because you don’t know that we are the seeds.”
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October 1917 Revolution: A century later
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 15.00Price range: USD $ 5.00 through USD $ 15.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageOctober 1917 Revolution: A century later
Great revolutions make history. Conservative resistance and counter-revolutions only delay their progress. The French revolution invented modern politics and democracy, the Russian revolution paved the way for the socialist transition, while the Chinese revolution connected the emancipation of those peoples oppressed by imperialism with the path to socialism. These revolutions are great precisely because they are bearers of undertakings that are far ahead of the immediate demands of their time. beacons that illuminate the still unfinished struggles of the peoples for the realization of these goals. It is impossible to understand the contemporary world by ignoring these great revolutions. To commemorate these revolutions, says Samir Amin, one needs both to assess their ambitions (the utopia of today will be the reality of tomorrow), and to understand the reasons for their temporary setbacks. Conservative and reactionary minds refuse to do so—they wish us to believe that great revolutions have been nothing more than unfortunate accidents, that the peoples who have made them were carried away by their deceitful enthusiasm, diversions from the normal current of history. This collection of essays helps to situate the lessons of the October 1917 Russian Revolution from a perspective of 100 years.
Egyptian economist and intellectual, Samir Amin (1931-2018), was one of the world’s greatest radical thinkers —a creative Marxist’. He was the director of Third World Forum (Forum du tiers monde), Dakar and President of the World Forum for Alternatives. He published numerous books and papers, including The Law of Value and Historical Materialism, Eurocentrism – Modernity, Religion and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism?‘, Global History – a View from the South and Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
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Rooted in struggle
This book is the culmination of several years of partnership between social movements, social justice organizations and academics in Ghana, South Africa, Guatemala and Canada. Called the Translocal Learning Network, this partnership has generated a space for those facing the multiple and overlapping crises of our time to come together and share knowledge and mutually solidarize with each other’s struggles. This knowledge exchange and mutual solidarity has been non-hierarchical and collaborative in nature, and has taken the form of sharing and commenting on complex stories through a participatory research methodology known as narrative restorying. As such, this book will focus on the stories each partner has shared, along with engagement with these stories by other members of the network. This interplay of knowledge sharing will provide a window into the social movement learning of network members.
The central argument of the book was best captured by Thapelo Mohapi in our recent presentation at the Development Studies Association conference at SOAS in London, UK: “It is always assumed that when you are poor, when you are living in a shack, when you live in a rural area, when you are marginalized, that you cannot think for yourself, that you cannot be involved in development, because you are poor”; instead of this “People must make decisions and must be consulted, and they must have a voice to speak about their own development. It must be initiated and completed with the people.” This book is literally a space where those on the front line of struggles against land dispossession, livelihood dispossession, violent resource exploitation, forced marginal living, climate fueled emergencies, and the denigration of cultural and traditional indigenous knowledge share their experiences, learning, successes, and defeats, with those facing similar and related struggles. In addition to these front-line voices, scholars working alongside these struggles, share some of their learnings and ideas that have emerged from the partnership, and these reflections are also brought into dialogue with front-line activists. In other words, this book provides a window into a rich, ongoing dialogue of mutual learning and support that will speak to audiences in the activist and critical academic communities.
To that point, this translocal network uses the notion of translocality to push back on the capitalist, colonial, and neo-liberal agenda of a)maintaining divisions between people struggling against oppression in different parts of the world (through border controls, language divisions, and colonial racialized othering); and, b)maintaining a knowledge hierarchy that states, international institutions, intellectual institutions, and corporations are those best able to contend with the many crises we face, and even within activists, it is those movements and organizations with broad, multinational reach that can best speak for the affected. Translocality rather argues that it is those with local knowledge of crises and context that are best positioned to speak to what needs to change, and that local struggles meeting each other as equals, translocally, is the best way to learn from one another without imposing new forms of knowledge hierarchies. -
The Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 15.00Price range: USD $ 5.00 through USD $ 15.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageThe Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising
There was nothing but darkness in the spring of 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic raged and shut down the economy. But as right-wing protesters demanded an end to the lockdown, a much bigger social conflict was brewing under the surface. A rebellion exploded in Minneapolis in response to the brutal police murder of George Floyd in late May, during which a police station was overtaken and burned down. The uprising quickly spread across the United States as protesters looted downtown urban centers, set fire to cop cars, vandalized government buildings, and fought the police. The Black proletariat led the charge, but white, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous proletarians also joined the fight, demonstrating new possibilities for building alliances. While anti-police rebellions continued throughout the summer and fall, the uprising receded with the start of the winter. But this conflict is far from over.
In an effort to think through the experience of the uprising and prepare for the great struggles that are coming, The Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising provides an in-depth analysis of what exactly happened during the 2020 uprising, its potentials, internal limits, and strategic implications.
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Beyond the Neocolonial: Africa and the Dialectics of Human Emancipation
To begin to think the emancipation of humanity on the African continent, we must start by distancing the thought and practice of politics from state thinking. State thinking has been and continues to be the core subjective aspect of the continuing failure of an emancipatory politics of equality on our continent. State thinking in the present day is no longer simply colonial but neocolonial. This means that state colonial practices have been modified but not to the extent that colonialism has been abolished. It still exists but under modified forms. The only way to think about political emancipation of the whole of humanity is to understand and practice dialectical thought. The dialectic of politics necessarily assumes a process of becoming of a popular political subject and its continued existence vis-à-vis the state. The latter can only think analytically and not dialectically because it is concerned with maintaining a system of socio-political places to which people are allocated according to criteria that ensure the reproduction of relations of domination, themselves underpinned by capitalist relations of exploitation.
This book traces the contradiction between dialectical thought and analytical thought, beginning with the Ancient Egyptians and Asiatic Greeks up to the present day among African people. It reviews the way in which emancipatory politics was thought in practice by classical Marxist thinkers and also the centrality of popular African culture in the thinking of African revolutionaries. It argues that a political dialectic was present to varying degrees in the thought of these thinkers and that they all attempted to confront state analytical thinking and practice with varying degrees of success at different times. The subjective problem they faced was that the dialectic founded on the idea of the universality of movement to which they adhered was in constant conflict with the stasis of analytical thought itself enabled by a belief in the party as representing the people that was ultimately to be realized in the capture of state power.
It is further shown that popular African thought, as expressed in metaphorical proverbs, regularly contains references to a human universal, thus deploying much more than rhetoric in a potential for dialectical thought. Popularly expressed reason frequently operates metaphorically and not within the delimited analytical categories deployed by academics and the state. This political process of the struggle between the dialectic and the analytic in thought-practice is also traced in Haiti whose culture is heavily influenced by Africa. The emancipatory egalitarian politics pursued there after independence in 1804, and their destruction by a neocolonial state predicted the same process in post-colonial African countries. At the same time Africa has witnessed the invention of alternatives to the party form of organization, particularly during the struggle for freedom in South Africa in the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that the anatomy of the neocolonial state on our continent must be understood primarily from the point of those it rules in order to unravel its neocolonial character. The creation and eulogizing of heroic figures during popular struggles for freedom is no substitute for the universal truth that only the oppressed can liberate both themselves and humanity from what is rapidly becoming the living hell of neocolonial capitalism.Table of Contents
Introduction: what is to be thought?
Politics as a Collective Thought-Practice and Human Emancipation as its Essence
The Ancients and the Thought of Politics: arkhē and the ‘dialectic’ of physis and nomos
Sourcing an Emancipatory Politics for Today: reviewing the classics
Thinking Emancipatory Politics through African Popular Culture
Resolving Contradictions and the Dialectical Potential of Proverbial Metaphors
Haiti: from inventive popular sovereignty to neocolonial state
Beyond the Party Form? An alternative organisation and the figure of the heroic liberator
Perverted Freedom and the Anatomy of the African Neocolonial State
Conclusion: Silencing as an analytical procedure in political theory and practice -
Lenin150 (Samizdat): 2nd expanded edition
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 30.00Price range: USD $ 5.00 through USD $ 30.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageLenin150 (Samizdat): 2nd expanded edition
Lenin150 (Samizdat) aims to contribute to the re-kindling of the communist attractor by engaging, in the spirit of critical solidarity, with Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in the year of his 150th anniversary. Conceived out of the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, the book brings together contributions from all continents, ranging in style from the academic to the lyrical. As such, these compelling, and in some cases absolutely urgent, appropriations of (the spectre of) Lenin aspire to be of considerable use-value for the struggles ahead.
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Ghostlines – Re-Drawing the LAPSSET Corridor in Kenya
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They meet Peter, a retired pilot who had previously worked for a conservancy and can tell stories about the LAPSSET from high above and from the ground. He understands how everyone involved is seeking to benefit from the corridor in their own way, even if that means building uninhabited “ghost huts” that manifest the presence of pastoral communities and thus qualify them for compensation. Jane is an activist for a women’s and Indigenous rights organization. She’s been fighting invisible monsters her entire life: stalking hyenas (metaphorical and real), corrupt politicians, and the patriarchy itself. The spectre of the LAPSSET is only the last one of these hidden monsters. They meet Joseph, a herder, who hopes that the LAPSSET might connect him to far places but worries that it will instead cut him off of the grazing grounds that are essential for the survival of his family. What is the LAPSSET – a road or a fence? In Oldonyoro they meet Rashid, a poet, who writes about the long history of the corridor. In his mind, it reaches far back to colonial times. “My grandfather suffered greatly,” he writes, “Is it my turn to face the worst? I wonder, a tricky treasure”. In the last village on their journey, they meet a group of women who have come together to support each other. Their position on the LAPSSET is more optimistic. The real connections of solidarity they forged contrast with the imaginary ghostlines of the LAPSSET. The narrative structure of the geo-graphic novel draws connections between the narrators, that is, the team of researchers and artists and the interviewees. They seek to unravel the idea of the omniscient or unbiased narrator and to reveal how storytellers bring their own ghosts into stories. By connecting all of these narratives along their journey, they challenge the single, universalist story that planners tell about large-scale infrastructure projects. Instead, they invite the reader to embrace the often-contradictory multiplicity of infrastructural relations, to see the ostensibly solid lines on maps for what they are: a messy, ever-changing braiding of multitudes.
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Revolución Rinky-Dink: Yendo Más Allá del Capitalismo Negando Consentimiento, y Promoviendo Construcciones Creativas y Destrucciones Creativas
Este panfleto aborda la pregunta: ¿cómo podemos pasar de A a B, del capitalismo al poscapitalismo? La revolución de Rinky-dink involucra acciones e inacciones que son fáciles, seguras, mundanas, sin glamour y factibles dentro de la vida de cada persona.
Howard Waitzkin presenta una intervención clara y directa para el cambio revolucionario en el sistema económico capitalista global. Cubre mucho terreno, con sofisticación, mientras mantiene la discusión en tierra. Su enfoque en las formas de facilitar un desafío al capital y construir una mayor transformación revolucionaria es crucial en esta coyuntura histórica. Esta discusión sobre construcciones creativas y destrucciones creativas es particularmente útil.
— Brett Clark, profesor de sociología de la Universidad de Utah y autor De El Robo De La Naturaleza: Capitalismo Y Grieta Ecológica, The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and Ecological Rift en inglés.
El fin del capitalismo es posible. Waitzkin nos lleva un paso más allá en el proceso creativo para esta transformación. A través de ejemplos específicos de grupos organizados dentro de los Estados Unidos y en el extranjero, este trabajo constituye una guía práctica para todos. Waitzkin alienta nuestra creatividad para actos organizados y seguros además de omisiones para trascender el capitalismo.
— Nylca J. Munoz Sosa, abogada, líder de salud pública y activista centrada en la justicia sanitaria y la descolonización en Puerto Rico.
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A region in revolt: Mapping the recent uprisings in North Africa and West Asia
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A wave of mass protest movements has spread across North Africa and West Asia, including Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran. The mass protests have much in common, from opposing authoritarian regimes and worsening economic situations to demanding radical changes in social relations. Despite their similarities, each protest movement operates under different conditions that cannot be ignored. The specific historic, political and economic contexts of each country have determined who the key actors of the uprisings are and their location across old and new divides. This book elaborates on these similarities and differences to paint a clearer picture of these movements and draw out lessons to inform future struggles.
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