Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of
revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, 'progress = modernisation through industrialisation,' to which it has owed its political life?
Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of
concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and
inclusive of difference — these are new forces being mobilised to make another future
possible.
Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands
of grass roots movements to fight racial and gender violence, state-led terrorism, and
capitalist exploitation of people and the planet worldwide. The twenty-first century
has already witnessed unprecedented popular mobilizations. Unencumbered by old
dogmas, mobilizations of opposition are not only happening, they are gaining support
and developing a global consciousness in the process. They are themselves a chain of
signifiers, creating solidarity across language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and every
other difference.
Trans-local solidarities exist. They came first. The right-wing authoritarianism and
anti-immigrant upsurge that has followed is a reaction against the amazing visual
power of millions of citizens occupying public space in defiance of state power.
We cannot know how to act politically without seeing others act. This book provides
photographic evidence of that fact, while making us aware of how much of the new
revolutionary vernacular we already share.
