THE JOURNAL OF THE MENTAL ENVIRONMENT

ADBUSTERS M

ay/June 2013 • #107 • Volume 21 Num

ber 3 The Epic Story of Hum

anity: Part 1

-Graeme Maxton, The End of Progress

Coc

kere

l (1

93

8),

Pab

lo P

icas

so

The next five issues of Adbusters: The epic story of humanity

The product of art

must be entirely

devoid of artifice or

ulterior motive of

any kind.

Roy

LIc

hten

stei

n

Ohh

h...

Alr

ight

... (

196

4),

Roy

Lic

hten

stei

n

Wan

dere

r A

bove

the

Sea

and

Fog

(18

18),

Cas

par

Dav

id F

ried

rich

Autum

n Landscape, Zhao Ji

In a lovely little panegyric for the distinguished European philosopher Slavoj Žižek, we read:

There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, not to men-tion others working in Brazil, Australia and China.

What’s immediately apparent in this opening para-graph is the unabashedly European character and disposition of the thing the author calls “philos-ophy today” — thus laying a claim on both the subject and time that is peculiar and in fact an ex-clusive property of Europe.

Even Judith Butler who is cited as an example from the United States is decidedly a product of European philosophical genealogy, thinking some-where between Derrida and Foucault, brought to bear on our understanding of gender and sexuality.

To be sure, China and Brazil (and Australia, which is also a European extension) are cited as the

location of other philosophers worthy of the desig-nation, but none of them evidently merits a specific name to be sitting next to these eminent European philosophers.

The question of course is not the globality of philo-sophical visions that all these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and Muslim world (“deep and far,” that is, from a fic-tive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives.

That goes without saying, for without that confi-dence and self-consciousness these philosophers and the philosophical traditions they represent can scarce lay any universal claim on our epistemic cre-dulities, nor would they be able to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and write a sentence.

These are indeed not only eminent philosophers, but the philosophy they practice has the global-ity of certain degrees of self-conscious confidence

without which no thinking can presume universality.

The question is rather something else: what about other thinkers who operate outside this European philosophical pedigree, whether they practice their thinking in the European languages they have colonially inherited or else in their own moth-er tongues — in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, thinkers that have actually earned the dignity of a name, and perhaps even the pedigree of a “public intellectual”?

What about thinkers outside the purview of these European philosophers; how are we to name and designate and honour and learn from them with the epithet of “public intellectual” in the age of glo-balized media?

Do the constellation of thinkers from South Asia, exemplified by leading figures like Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Sudipta Kaviraj, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha or Akeel Bilgrami, come together to form a nucleus of thinking that is conscious of itself? Would that constellation perhaps merit the word “thinking” in a manner that would qualify one of them — as a South Asian — to the term “philoso-pher” or “public intellectual”?

Are they “South Asian thinkers” or “thinkers” the way these European thinkers are? Why is it that if Mozart sneezes it is “music” but the most so-phisticated Indian mu-sic ragas are the subject of “ethnomusicology”?

Is that “ethnos” not also ap-plicable to the philosophi-cal thinking that Indian philosophers practice — so much so that their think-ing is more the subject of Western European and North American anthro-pological fieldwork and investigation?

We can turn around and look at Africa. What about thinkers like Henry Odera Oruka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Okot p’Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, V.Y. Mudimbe: Would they qualify for the term “philosopher” or “public intellectual” perhaps, or is that also “ethnophilosophy”?

Why is European philosophy “philosophy,” but African philosophy “ethnophilosophy,” the way Indian music is “ethnomusic”? This is an ethno-graphic logic that is based on the very same reason-ing that if you were to go to the New York Museum of Natural History, you only see animals and non-white peoples and their cultures featured inside glass cages. No cage is in sight for white people and their cultures. They just get to stroll through the aisles and enjoy the power and ability of looking at taxidermic Yaks, cave dwellers, elephants, Eskimos, buffalo, Native Americans — all in a single wind-ing row.

The same ethnographic gaze is evident in the en-counter with the intellectual disposition of the Arab or Muslim world: Azmi Bishara, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Abdallah Laroui, Michel Kilo, Abdolkarim Soroush. The list of prominent thinkers is endless.

In Japan, Kojin Karatani, in Cuba, Roberto Fernández Retamar, or even in the United States people like Cornel West, whose thinking is not en-tirely in the European continental tradition — what about them? Where do they fit in? Can they think? Is what they do also thinking, philosophical, per-tinent, perhaps, or is that also suitable for ethno-graphic examinations?

The question of Eurocentricism is now entirely blasé. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not? They are the in-heritors of multiple (now defunct) em-pires and they still carry within them the phantom hu-bris of those empires. They think their particular philoso-phy is “philosophy” and their particular thinking is “think-ing,” and everything else is — as the great European philos-opher Emmanuel Lévinas was wont of

saying — “dancing.”

The question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever

Michel Foucault

Unti

tled

(R

osa

Luxe

mbu

rg)

1920

, El L

issi

tzky

Jennilee Marigomen, jennileemarigomen.com

Zen Buddhists say: Wash out your mouth every time you say Buddha. To contemporary environmentalists, I wish to say: Wash out your mouth every time you say “Nature” or “Environment”!

So long as we live fixated on our screens, unacquainted with the smell of dirt, we will remain caught in this double bind: alienated from nature, longing for “Nature.”

So long as we feel detached from nature, we will yearn for it — as if it were something separate, as if it were just a concept of our invention, as if we were not born-of and made-of it, as if we could even exist or survive without the relations that comprise it.

So long as we “grow” and “progress” and “develop,” we will dream in screenshots instead of landscapes. Forests, deer and wolves will be good for desktop pictures. We will cordon off our love for only a select few species of animals, while the rest we will use for food, clothing and entertainment. This is why they don’t visit me in my dreams. Why they do not speak to us anymore. Why they run away when humans get close.

Jodi Cobb/N

ational Geograph

ic Stock

In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money, released in the first week of November last year, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of “Wall Street greed” but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.

This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that if they pay their credit card bills on time and don’t take out loans, they aren’t paying interest. This, says Dr. Kennedy, is not true. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay their bills. They must pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell and before the end buyer pays for the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are passed on to the ultimate consumer. Dr. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging from 12% for garbage collection, to 38% for drinking water, to 77% for rent in public housing in her native Germany.

Her figures are drawn from the research of economist Helmut Creutz, writing in German and interpreting Bundesbank publications. They apply to the expenditures of German households for everyday goods and services in 2006; but similar figures are seen in financial sector profits in the United States, where they composed a whopping 40% of U.S. business profits in 2006. That was five times the 7% made by the banking sector in 1980. Bank assets, financial profits, interest, and debt have all been growing exponentially.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute.

Karass Ad, American Way, January 2012

we’ve always said – our stars: water in

public hands, schools in public hands, public health

service. If they follow us they follow us. If they don’t,

the battle will be very harsh for them, very harsh. They

cannot understand. They cannot conceive of things. They need

psychiatric analysis. They are failed people. They’ve been

there for 25, or 30 years, and they have brought the country

to the point of catastrophe. What makes me feel really ill are

the millions of people that have been staying afloat in the

crisis, that have just been marginally affected by the crisis,

that have managed to just get by to the detriment of the

other lot of millions of people that cannot go on any more.

Italy’s problem is this set of people. And as long as the

salaries and the pensions of these people are not at risk

it’s fine to immobilise the country. But this won’t last

long. This situation won’t last long at all.

We’ll start to do what

#KILLCAP IN BERLIN

When we first started dreaming about #killcap at Adbusters, we always imagined that it would take a killer app, a hot developer and tens of thousands of dollars. But now we’re learning from jammers in Berlin that #killcap can be played with nothing more than audacity and a viral video. “The idea of Camover is to destroy as many cctv-cams as possible and for this we decided to announce a competition,” explain the anonymous organizers of this paradigm shifting live-action game. To join in you need a group with a name that starts with command, brigade, cell, platoon, etc. and ends with a historic person. Points are awarded for the most creative acts. It was fun. Word got around. And after a few weeks, a video of the highest scoring Camover jams went global, kicking the game to another level... now players in other cities are joining in! Now we wonder: could #killcap spring up and proliferate just like this?

Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement has emerged as a political powerhouse in Italy after sweeping 25 percent of the vote in the February election on an eco-populist platform.

As I watched Barack Obama delivering his second inaugural address last month, and listened to his call to “respond to the threat of climate change” lest we “betray our children and future” generations, I could not help but think of another president.

>>

The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house.And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself] And it smells of sulfur still today.Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that’s their democratic model. It’s the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that’s imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons. What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy. What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs? The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It’s not that we are extremists. It’s that the world is waking up. It’s waking up all over. And people are standing up … What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceania. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision.We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.

Addressing the UN General Assembly in September of 2006, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez stunned the world’s leaders with a speech that described the U.S. President George W. Bush as “the devil” and called U.S. “imperialism” a menace. This is an abridged version of that courageous speech.

Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you.

Lucas Jackson/R

euters

THIS MACHINE CAUSES GLOBAL WARMING

Sixteen years is all the time we have left to reduce our oil addiction

and avert the predicted 2 degree cel-sius global temperature rise caused

largely by automobiles. The #16yearsleft campaign, started by Toronto based

activist/art group Our Horizon, is push-ing for city councils across the world to

put warning labels on gas pumps. Go to ourhorizon.org and start with your hood.

WHAT WAS THAT BUMP?

I leave the stickers in my glove compartment so that whenever I’m on a drive, I’ve got a way to earn #killcap points. Stickers are silent, fast and effective. I just grab some designs from the web and print them at home. It may not earn as many

points as rancid butter in Goldman Sachs, but by now I’ve probably slapped a few hundred memes onto the gasoline pumps around town. I bike whenever possible. I’m a vegan usually. And I offset my carbon emissions by playing #killcap.

Jay Wall, Our Horizon

COMING IN ADBUSTERS #108

¡Por fin! Adbusters en español

COMING SOON

ADBUSTERS CHINA

One sixth of the world begins playing #killcap.

A SHIFT IN THE T H E O R E T I C A L FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE!

In a time of dark apocalyptic forebodings comes an explosive heterodox textbook by Adbusters, the cultural insurgents that launched Buy Nothing Day and Occupy Wall Street. A visual masterpiece in the groundbreaking flow-based aesthetic that Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn has pioneered for twenty years, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is a 400-page manifesto for serious study by the young insurgents who will be tomorrow’s leaders, bankers, cultural and economic theorists …

We abandon everything we thought we knew about progress. We completely re-imagine industry, nutrition, communication, transportation, housing and money. Humanity, and the world we depend on, are sustained. – Kalle Lasn

Seven Stories Press (US) | Penguin (UK & Commonwealth) | Random House (Canada)

KICKITOVER.ORG

Riemann/Random House (Germany) | Fora do Eixo (Brazil) | Open Books (Korea) Cover photo: Gil Inoue Model: Esther Varella

Top right corner photo: Slim Letaief

THE EPIC STORY OF HUMANITY

PART II:SUMMER

One of the recurrent gripes about the movement we’ve come to call “Occupy” has been its failure to conceive a plan of action, a concerted strategy during its insurrection. There wasn’t and still isn’t any strategic campaign, critics say, no coordination between particular occupations, no sense of how to amalgamate and channel all that anger and dissatisfaction into a singular, unified oppositional force — one that can stick around over the long haul.

The most recent salvo is Thomas Frank’s in The Baffler magazine: “With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. ‘The process is the message’... Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the world.” What comes next after the insurrection, after the good guys have assumed power, or even when they’re still trying to wrestle against power? Žižek has been vocal here: “carnivals are cheap,” he says. “What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?” Egypt, as a case in point, is still feeling the heat of a “successful” insurrection from two years ago.

These two questions are intimately related and form part and parcel of the same revolutionary simultaneous equation:

organizing an insurrection, consolidating it, moving through it, and then planning for its aftermath, putting in place something new, establishing a different set of social institutions and social relations in lieu of the old oppressive ones. (Simultaneous equations, we might remember, are equations between two unknowns, unknowns that must be solved at the same time.) This dual conundrum has preoccupied revolutionaries and revolutionary thought since time immemorial. Walter Benjamin plotted the revolution in his own head, even while — especially while — he lurched toward his shadow figure, Blanqui, the man of action, the arch-conspirator who spent thirty of his seventy-six years on earth in various French gaols.

Blanqui was everything Benjamin wasn’t: practical, fearless, ruthless. His very raison d’être was organization, plotting and propagandizing for the insurrection. Blanqui, Marx said, was the “head and soul” of the French workers’ movement. But Blanqui satisfies only the first part of that revolutionary simultaneous equation. “The activities of a professional conspirator like Blanqui,” Benjamin says, “certainly do not presuppose any belief in progress — they merely presuppose a determination to do away with present injustice.” This firm resolve to snatch humanity at the last moment from the catastrophe looming at every turn is characteristic of Blanqui — more so than any other revolutionary politician of the time. He always refused to develop plans for what comes “later.”

Blanqui dreamed of a worldwide league of revolutionary communists. He tried to put that dream into reality, countenancing conspiracy as one method for instigating insurrection. Blanqui’s communism was an eclectic mix of Marxism avant la lettre and heterodox anarchism, of trying to consummate the revolutionary hopes begun in 1789, yet which ended in Thermidorian backlash.

Blanqui “couldn’t adjust himself to an organization of huge dimensions,” Samuel Bernstein says in Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection (1971). “It rendered absurd his strategy of insurrection; and it placed in the foreground the working class which he had never regarded as a key propeller of history.” Blanqui’s political organization was limited in size, Bernstein says, tightly pulled together, hierarchical in structure; made “like a seamless garment, programmatically homogeneous, disciplined, obedient and ready to move.” Blanqui’s insurrection was vertically organized yet spread itself out horizontally, immanently entering daily life, not so much a factory struggle as an urban war, a civil war rooted above all else — or below all else — in the street.

The key organizing medium for Blanquists was the “Society of the Seasons,” formed in the 1830s when Marx was still a fresh-faced lad. The society met clandestinely; leaders went unseen; meetings recruited foot soldiers who’d form an army of revolt, ready for action — violent action. The Society’s network barely

GOLDMAN SACHS HAS 73 OFFICES WORLDWIDE . . .

Pull out and

post all over

ANDY MERRIFIELD

AND WE’RE GOING TO HAVE SOME FUN IN FRONT OF EVERY ONE OF THEM!

stretched beyond Paris; but its covert nature of cells unnerved the powers that be and meant the Society punched above its weight, or at least threatened to. In Blanqui’s time, these Society of the Seasons were the revolutionary Jacobin clubs forty years down the line. Blanqui may have disagreed; in his early career he admired the “Incorruptible” Jacobin, Robespierre, but later claimed he was really a Hébertist, a descendent of the radical eighteenth-century journalist Jacques-René Hébert.

Blanqui knew, just as Robespierre knew, just as any revolutionary today must know, that if an insurrection were to succeed, it would have to muster support from the faubourgs, from the banlieues, from the peripheral hinterlands. Revolutionaries nowadays need to establish cells in the banlieues, cells within urban cells, such that revolutionary activity can flow through the capillaries and arteries of our global urban fabric, through its physical and fiber-optic infrastructure, through its hardware and thoughtware. These secret cells must plot to stymie the dominant flow of things and will likely be spearheaded by professional organizers and tacticians, by black bloc’er anarchists, by socialists and autonomous communists of different stripes and persuasions, by anonymous rookies, by those who’ve never yet been politically active, by young casseurs and voyous, by everybody who, with Occupy and the Arab Spring, with the revolt in the banlieues, with the ongoing civil war everywhere, with growing unemployment, have found some medium to channel and refract their energies and dissatisfactions.

Perhaps there’s a neo-Jacobinism blowing in wind, not quite bawling out but certainly getting whispered, a revival of Jacobin values with its great desire to abolish slavery in our urban neo-colonies, to denounce aristocratic plenty and root for sans-culotte empowerment.

The Jacobin club was founded on the eve of Revolution, in a Dominican convent on the Seine’s Right Bank, along rue Saint-Honoré. Meetings there were secret debating societies, made up of left-leaning deputies, republican enemies of the monarchy who’d push for the constitution of 1791. The club bore the noble label “Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality.” Later

it opened its membership to small storeowners and artisans. Over 5,000 clubs operated throughout France; pamphlets and newspapers got published; rallies and processions organized. After the fall of the monarchy, Robespierre led the Jacobins in the National Convention.

But the revolutionary fervor of the Jacobins came through its popularism, through the support of the sans-culottes. “Those beings,” a 1793 archive says, “who go everywhere on foot, who at no point have millions in the bank, nor a chateau, nor valets at their beck and call; who lodge simply and at night present themselves to their section ... applying all their force to pulverize those who come from that abominable faction of stately men.” And those stately men, the aristocrats? “They’re the rich,” another 1793 document says, “all those fat merchants, all the monopolizers, the mountebanks, the bankers, all the swindlers and all those who have something.” Sound familiar? Just like Goldman Sachs, in fact.

And a “Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality,” a neo-Jacobin radicalism today that’s as organized and offensive as its namesake from the 1790s? Why not? This time, though, such a society would need to be “popular,” to have its doors open to all types of sans-culottes, and all genders. Meeting halls, debating chambers and political networks might be less grandiose: in cafés and on street corners, at youth centers, in university classrooms, anywhere where young people hang out. Dialogue might be online as well as face-to-face; a society of “friends” puts another egalitarian spin on Facebook camaraderie.

But let’s be clear: secrecy would be paramount in these meetings, certainly initially, given how the forces of law and order mercilessly cracks down on all subversive politicking. We’ve heard about how the FBI infiltrated Occupy Wall Street (OWS), tracked known activists and student radicals, even on college campuses. The “Partnership for Civil Justice Fund” (PCJF), a US watchdog civil rights group, recently blew the whistle when they obtained FBI documents: “from its inception,” PCJF say, “the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat.” FBI offices and agents, “were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a

month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.” And in France, especially in the banlieues, the “Brigade Anti-Criminalité” (BAC), overtly and covertly, has intensified “special police units” patrolling “les zones sensibles.” As Mathieu Rigouste writes in La Domination Policière, “the generalization of the BAC in urban territories is one of the decisive stamps of the counter-insurrectional restructuring of the police.”

If anything, “austerity” these days has become a veritable 9/11 in Europe: a watchword, for neoliberal governments to quieten any dissenting voice. In Greece, where austerity has been most brutally implemented, “centers of lawlessness” have been nipped in the bud. Early this past January, two longstanding “occupied” social centers in Athens, Villa Amalias and Skaramanga, with over 100 makeshift residents, were evicted. Former denizens were promptly arrested in a relentless police war of attrition, “Operation Zeus,” against all those outside the dominant orthodoxy, including undocumented migrants. In Al Jazeera, Antonis Vradis reports from the frontline: “The eviction of Villa Amalias and the forthcoming police operation,” Vradis says, “reveals what is an inescapable contradiction in the reformulation of power in the Greek territory: In its short-term quest for stability, it is accelerating long-term social and political change.”

Against such short-term desperation for stability comes, then, an urgent and accelerated need for social and political change. Any Jacobin revival has to take us into and through the insurrection; and it has to leave us with something to build upon on the other side, in the aftermath. Which leads us to the second part of our revolutionary simultaneous equation. One of the amazing things Eric Hazan points out in Une histoire de la Révolution Française, his fresh take on the French Revolution — is how quickly it all happened, how fast an immense and deeply entrenched power structure and administration evaporated, caved in, without warning nor transition.

Hazan details the spirit of the Jacobin club: “the Society and its affiliates functioned as a system of diffusion of radical ideas. Nothing is more absurd than the notion of ‘Jacobinism’ as an authoritarian Parisian dictatorship. That’s a fabrication inherited from the [counter-revolutionary] Thermidor, which endures along with a hatred of the Revolution.” Hazan devotes memorable, generous lines to the National Convention, the first revolutionary assembly elected through universal (male) suffrage. “Was the Convention representative of the people?” he asks. If considered as an electoral system, which is to say, as a system of participatory democracy, then clearly not. Yet the virtues of the Convention, and its suggestive, enduring visionary politics, came and might still come through an altogether different means. To be sure, the Convention is still

unprecedented in how it allowed ordinary people to intervene in its sittings. That ordinary citizens and not a few sans-culottes could pass through the hollowed gates of Parliamentary politics was remarkable then and almost unthinkable now.

Although the Convention’s Salle du Manège was limited in size, it did manage to receive three thousand citizens at any one time. At tribunals, says Hazan, ordinary folk “didn’t hesitate to noisily speak out their opinion”; deputies were forced to respond on the spot and were directly answerable to peoples’ plain outspokenness, to interrogation from their constituents. Alongside this popular participation, sittings of the Convention kicked off by listening to peoples’ letters, often voicing long commentaries on deputies’ propositions, offering suggestions, sympathetic encouragement, angry critique. “In this regard,” concludes Hazan, “the Convention is the first and only national assembly where the people had been able to have their voice directly heard.”

So a message rings out, loud and jarringly: what an insurrection needs to do is force those Parliamentary doors open, smash them down if necessary, so that “the people” gain access. Not so much a participatory government as the chance for a real representative assembly, one in which elected politicians, for the first time in centuries, would actually be responsive to their electorate, engaging with them within an open democratic structure. They’d be answerable, in other words, to the populace not to the usual powerful suspects.

But how to keep counter-revolutionary economic and political interests at bay, how to justifiably shut them out of any new Convention, how to ruthlessly shut them out if necessary? The theme of violence inevitably enters the scene, the idea that there’s a legitimate violence responsive to the everyday violence initiated by the forces of law and order, from its judiciary to its paramilitary, from its surveillance and containment to the outright wars it wages against people its power base doesn’t like. War, from this standpoint, is a just-in-case response, a strike-first-ask-questions-later initiative, a branch of “democracy” that needs to construct its own inconceivable foe: terrorists. Guy Debord confirmed as much back in 1988: “Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. People must certainly never know everything about terrorism,” says Debord, “but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable.”

More than two hundred years after Robespierre’s execution, an ideological logic lives on in governments around the world, one that defiles the Jacobin legacy, panders to a revisionist, right-wing Thermidorian telling of the truth. Robespierre was a bloody tyrant, a fanatical monster, a terrorist butcher. And yet, as Eric Hazan maintains, “Robespierre took positions of great coherence and astonishing courage — positions where he

For reprint permission, contact reprints@adbusters.org.

Portions of the magazine may be photocopied for educational purposes. Adbusters magazine

is published by Adbusters Media Foundation. GST# R127330082, ISBN/

ISSN 0847-9097. ©Copyright 2012 by Adbusters Media Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the USA.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFKalle Lasn

EDITOR-AT-LARGE Micah White

SENIOR EDITORSDarren Fleet,

Stefanie Krasnow

ASSOCIATE EDITORandrea bennett

CIRCULATION MANAGER Ben Rawluk

INTERNS

Wendee Lang, Kyle Robertson, Dugan Nichols, Barbara Matthews,

Meaghan MacAneeley

VOLUNTEERS Kevin Estrada, Mike Rae,

Allison Thompson

PUBLISHERS Kalle Lasn, Bill Schmalz

CREATIVE DIRECTORPedro Inoue

ART DIRECTOR Ellen Lee

FRONT-END DEVELOPERAbdul Rehman Khewar

WEB DEVELOPERKarim Ratib

WEB ENGINEERJeremy Teale

NEWSSTAND SERVICES: Disticor

PRINTING: Quad Graphics

EMAIL: editor@adbusters.org, artdirector@adbusters.org, campaigns@adbusters.org,

subscriptions@adbusters.org

TELEPHONEtel: (604) 736-9401

toll-free: (800) 663-1243

POST 1243 West 7th Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6H 1B7 Canada

Every care has been taken to trace copyright holders for images and

text in this issue. However, if we have omitted anyone we apologize and will, if informed, make corrections.

INDIGNADOS - ZAPATISTAS - YA BASTA! - PUSSY RIOTERS - #KILLCAPPERS TIQQUNISTAS - ANARCHOS - OCCUPIERS - YA BASTA! - PUSSY RIOTERS

PIR

ATE

S - ID

LE N

O M

OR

E - JA

ZZ

ER

S - C

ULTU

RE

JAM

ME

RS

- IND

IGN

AD

OS

- ZA

PATIS

TAS

- YA B

AS

TA! #K

ILLC

AP

PE

RS

- P

IRA

TES

- M

EM

E W

AR

RIO

RS

- B

LUE

S -

GR

EE

NS

- B

LAC

KS

- O

CC

UP

IER

S -

YA

BA

STA

!

was always a minority and sometimes absolutely alone: against suffrage censitaire [census suffrage], for civic rights, against martial law, against slavery in the colonies, against the death penalty, for the right to petition, for the freedom of the press … In what country, in what assembly, have we ever heard so much contre-courant argument declared with such force of conviction?” Robespierre was defiled, still is defiled, because what he said threatened ruling class privilege, upset their status quo; to defile him thus serves to tarnish every future hope of revolution, of future social change. “I was born to fight crime,” he says in a final speech from 1794. “The time has not arrived for men of substance to be able to serve their homeland with impunity; defenders of liberty will be outlaws, for as long as the horde of scoundrels predominates.”

Let’s get a neo-Jacobin movement going that can contest the “horde of scoundrels” who still predominate. Let’s stand up to their arsenal and their ideologues. Let’s loosen the grip those financial mountebanks and swindlers have on our society. Let’s organize a concerted insurrection — one that knows what it’s fighting for as well as against. But to do so we need visionaries as well as agitators, conspirators like Blanqui but also leaders like Robespierre, people with big plans and grand convictions — outlaw mathematicians who know, perhaps more than anything else, all about revolutionary simultaneous equations.

Andy Merrifield is an independent scholar based in the UK. He has written several books including a biography of Situationist philosopher Guy Debord. His most recent books are Magical Marxism (2011) and John Berger (2012). Email: andy.merrifield@o2.co.uk.

At the moment, the planet might seem more poised for a series of un-

precedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political

transformation that would open the way to a better world. But if we are

going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes we’re going

to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of

2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagi-

nation stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number

of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed

on the collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assump-

tions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to

crumble overnight.

David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement Deanna Budgell

Goldman Sachs, the most powerful and unre-pentant of the financial fraudsters, has 3 of-

fices in Canada and 4 in the United Kingdom; 8 in China; 2 separate locations in Madrid and 19 scattered across the United States.

We take everything we learned from Cairo, Madrid and Zuccotti … combine it with the lessons of Quebec, Pussy Riot

and Idle No More … and turn #GOLDMAN into a global moment of truth for justice.

#GOLDMAN is an indefinite real-time, live-action game to shut down each of these locations. Points will be awarded for speed, spectacle,

courage and innovation.

AND WE’RE GOING TO HAVE SOME FUN IN FRONT OF EVERY ONE OF THEM!

GOLDMAN SACHS HAS 73 OFFICES WORLDWIDE...