Revolution is getting too small for us. Its centenary semantic wall seems
to crumble. Indeed, the Internet launches a gunshot of questions to the
heart of the meaning of revolution. Revolution is just “a forcible
overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system”? The
new system will emerge only after taking power? What if taking power after
revolution, as in Egypt, comes from the hand of the army? Is it still valid
the sequence revolution, counter-revolution, involution? Could it be that
the network is building, without taking power, a new system from new
protocols and unlikely connections?
A few years ago, the Marxist thinker John
Holloway<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holloway_%28sociologist%29>,
in his book Changing the world without taking
power<http://libcom.org/library/change-world-without-taking-power-john-holloway>,
began to glimpse the secret ways of the new revolutions. Holloway,
enthusiastic with those Mexican neozapatistas, fully questioned the meaning
of revolution. Those masked people who built their own world outside the
state, those Autonomous Zones of Chiapas, halfway between Hakim Bey´s
pirate utopias <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone> and
the indigenous culture of the commons, deeply inspired Holloway: “In this
revolutionary struggle there are no models, no recipes, just a question
terribly urgent. Not an empty question, but a question filled with a
thousand answers”. Perhaps we do not need a new and unique meaning for
revolution. Perhaps it is enough to interconnect the multiple new answers.
[permaculture] P2P Foundation's blog » Blog Archive » It Is Not a Revolution, It Is a New Networked Renaissance,
Lawrence London, 02/04/2014