Revolutions of Our Times - by The People Want

Book Synopsis

An urgent declaration that advances an internationalism from below focused on people and movements as agents of our collective liberation

We belong to a single transnational struggle--and we stand against an internationally organized elite. We know that if we remain isolated, we will achieve nothing. We have begun to weave a network of planetary connections from front lines to popular assemblies, from feminist strikes to resistance committees, from occupied roundabouts to occupied forests, and have discovered a common sensibility.

Revolutions of Our Times draws on the experience of uprisings taking place across the globe over the past two decades and sets out a vision for revolutionary internationalism.

"Although everything has been done to belittle the power of people in revolt, its impact has proved contagious .... Hope, courage, and insurrection have crossed bodies, territories, and all borders."--from the introduction

Review Quotes

"Every day, throughout the world, marginalized groups wage scattered struggles against their oppression, sometimes winning concessions and often losing, but it is only when poverty, repression, and constant insults to human dignity reach unbearable proportions that the people as a whole rise up against a regime. The rulers, supported by world powers, respond with utmost cruelty to crush the uprising, and even if a new regime survives the onslaught, it can be subverted to exercise centralized power, while the people fall back into patterns of internal division and subordination to authority. The response proposed by this manifesto is a global network of revolutionary collectives engaged in building grassroots democracy, to provide mutual aid (material, cultural, and moral) so that no one is left to meet repression in isolation, and to share lessons learned from victories and defeats: an inspiring call for internationalism from below!" --Rohini Hensman, author of, Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism

"Revolutions of Our Times is a precious contribution to a truly internationalist mobilization against capitalism and imperialism. Such revolutionary voices are more than ever needed if we want humanity to survive." --Michael Löwy, author, Ecosocialism

"Revolutions of Our Times is a hard-hitting exploration of the challenges facing contemporary movements guided by emancipatory politics. Critical to twenty-first century emancipatory politics is a recognition of the need to clarify the very notion of 'the people, ' especially in highlighting the realities of marginalized populations for which global capitalism has little need. This volume also grapples with the entire notion of international solidarity of the oppressed in the twenty-first century, pushing the reader to appreciate the need for concrete assessments of actual conditions and the need to center our understandings on the struggles of the oppressed, rather than based on abstract geopolitics. This is a book I did not want to stop reading!" --Bill Fletcher, Jr., trade unionist, author, cofounder of the Black Radical Congress