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Taisteleva tutkimus/Aalto-yliopisto 27.3.2019

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Aalto-yliopisto 27.3.2019 klo 13.15–17.00

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Tutustu Teen Vogue -lehdessä julkaistuun tekstiin [1] (sama teksti myös alla) ja pohdi, millaiset valokuvat sopisivat kuvaamaan vastarintaa, kapinaa ja vallankumousta. Etsi näihin jokaiseen mielestäsi sopivat kuvat. Katsomme 27.3.2019 keskusteluluennon yhteydessä valitsemianne kuvia ja keskustelemme yhdessä niiden valintaperusteista.

Resistance, rebellion, revolution

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/resistance-rebellion-revolution-explainer-interviews

Kuvat

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Liitä tähän alle kuvan linkki (painamalla ensin Muokkaa tai Muokkaa wikitekstiä -painiketta ja linkin lisäyksen jälkeen Julkaise muutokset -painiketta).

Vallankumous (Nora)

The Revolution will not be televised: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnJFhuOWgXg

Vastarinta, kapina, vallankumous

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Resistance, Rebellion, Revolution: What They Are and How They Intersect

Lucy Diavolo

It has been two years since the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the massive, worldwide Women’s March protests that came the next day. In the time since, a capital-R Resistance to Trump, his administration, and his agenda has helped people focus energy on efforts to counteract his political machinations. “The resistance” has been an important development: It has engaged the public in politics and in protest, raised awareness about the deleterious effects of the administration, and become a go-to phrase to capture a moment. But it has also prompted criticisms of whether it’s enough to simply oppose Trump or if there is a responsibility to address the systemic forces he’s exploited, begging questions of whether or not something beyond resistance is necessary or even possible.

There have been moments that go beyond resistance in recent history. The Black Lives Matter movement and moments like Occupy Wall Street and Disrupt J20embody a spirit of rebellion. A context of resistance only gives that rebellious spirit room to grow and has given some people the impetus to question the nature of our society and wonder whether revolution — a true change to the systems of oppression, discrimination, and disenfranchisement — is possible, realistic, or too dangerous.

Teen Vogue spoke with two writers and scholars who shared their thoughts not only on resistance but on two other key concepts that create an alliterative spectrum of political opposition: rebellion and revolution. Though some may consider their ideas controversial, George Ciccariello-Maher and Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor have studied these concepts and share with us scholarly and historical perspectives on where they could fit into the spectrum of long-term, sustained social change.

What is resistance and what are its shortcomings?

The Resistance that has formed to address Trump’s tenure as president has been a high-water mark of outrage and action for many who were previously unengaged in opposition. The term gave people politically left of center a name for the passionate and well-founded objections to Trump’s presidency.

“Resistance is something that we do or can do every day, that we can do in a multiplicity of ways,” says Ciccariello-Maher, a writer, political organizer, and visiting scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. But he’s critical of the ways the term is used in the current moment, telling Teen Vogue, “Resistance is not babbling about Russian interference on MSNBC every single day of the f*cking week.” “Resistance is building actual movements,” Ciccariello-Maher explains. “Resistance is the Abolish ICE campaign that was unleashed over the summer. Resistance is embracing and helping border struggles and migrants, encouraging amnesty, supporting movements. Resistance is resisting police brutality and murder, and arguing for prison and police abolition. This is what resistance looks like.”

Taylor, who is an African-American Studies professor at Princeton University and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free, agrees that resistance is misunderstood in the current moment: “The meaning of resistance has become almost vague in the wide way that it's used, meaning that essentially anyone who opposes any aspect of Trump's agenda can be lumped into something referred to as a resistance. That doesn't really tell us very much about what that constitutes,” she says.

Both Ciccariello-Maher and Taylor believe that the capital-R Resistance isn’t necessarily something to be totally written off, though. “I do think what we see across this country is a deepening political understanding of the challenges that we face and an understanding that these are things that we cannot just vote our way out of,” Taylor says.

Ciccariello-Maher agrees that something important has happened: “The fact that the ‘hashtag resistance’ is able to draw in a lot of people who are frustrated with the status quo is incredibly useful, and it's something that revolutionaries at the other end of the spectrum need to understand, need to embrace, and need to help pull to the left, pull in the direction of more revolutionary change.”

How is rebellion different from resistance?

If resistance is daily acts of opposition to oppression and injustice, rebellion is something more extraordinary: It is embodied in specific events, protests, and moments that upset the order of daily life. “I understand rebellion then to be a more explosive, momentary instance, in which resistance takes a more concrete, combative form in the streets, in popular protests — crucially, I think historically, in riots, whether it's Ferguson and Baltimore or the many riots that have put into motion political transformation historically,” Ciccariello-Maher says of demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, after police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, two black men.

Taylor points to those examples, as well. She believes that rebellion has a power that resistance doesn’t in evoking centuries of oppression in a single moment, saying, “If we think about the Ferguson uprising and the Baltimore uprising, we can think about the ways that they really exposed the deep, what some may refer to as systemic, roots of racial inequality in the United States.”

To Taylor, the reality that Ferguson and Baltimore amplified — that African-Americans effectively are still second-class citizens in the 21st century — is part of a larger tapestry of rebellion’s power to raise “all sorts of questions about the kind of society that we are living in.” She says the fact that Los Angeles teachers are striking for basic education needs while the Department of Defense has a $700 billion budget exposes a key contrast and “raises the question of what is the nature of this society in the first place.”

“This is a question that, in some communities, exists all the time, but in the aftermath of larger protests and demonstrations, gets generalized across broad swaths of the population,” Taylor explains.

“We need to look at those explosive moments of rebellion — in other words like Ferguson, Baltimore, the moments that really crystallize something that needs to be changed, and transform consciences of millions of people in a relatively quick period of time,” Ciccariello-Maher says. He points to slave uprisings and the radical, anti-slavery abolitionist movement in the United States during the 19th century as an example of how change can happen by seizing on these moments.

“These things don't happen gradually; consciousness is not necessarily changed gradually,” Ciccariello-Maher says, explaining how moments of rebellion can expedite public conversations on change. “Certainly, when it comes to white supremacy, it's not changed because people are convinced that they're wrong. It's changed because, historically, those struggles that are unleashed show the world that it's unsustainable.” Ciccariello-Maher views rebellion as a potential stepping-stone to revolution, a concept fraught with debated meanings and different ideas. While there are many ideas about what revolution could mean, a larger question presents itself when the possibility is considered: Is it even feasible?

Is revolution possible? Or is it too dangerous?

While resistance and rebellion are ways to address the flaws in societal systems, revolution is often thought of as a wholesale rejection of it. Historical examples — many of which resulted in deaths — indicate that revolution understood as violent overthrow puts human life at risk. “The question of revolution then exists on what I would say is a wholly different plane [from resistance and rebellion]: When you're talking about revolution, you're talking about the complete and utter transformation of society and the way that it functions,” Taylor says. “And we haven't witnessed that.”

Ciccariello-Maher says that revolution does not necessarily have to mean violence; quite the contrary, he says, violence can serve no purpose in complex revolutionary work that is less about overthrowing a ruling party and more about having long-term impacts on social structures beyond the government.

“Revolution is an often-debated term, but it most often is understood as representing and reflecting a moment of overthrow of the existing state of affairs,” Ciccariello-Maher explains. “Now, whether that means just overthrowing the state or whether that means what's called a social revolution — a much more substantial transformation of the way things are done economically, socially, as well as politically — is a long-standing debate.” Considering the example of the 1917 Russian revolution, inspired by Marxist thought, Ciccariello-Maher says it’s an example of how surprising and unexpected these moments can be despite attempts to predict them.

“Not only did it take place in a location that many people did not expect — [Russia at the time was] considered to be a semi-feudal, kind of backward place — but it took place very, very quickly and through the quick thinking of, on the surface of it, a small number of people,” Ciccariello-Maher says. But he says models like Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959 were misleading for would-be revolutionaries in Western Europe and other parts of Latin America. He cites Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci’s idea of “civil society” — structures outside of the government such as church and education — as a hindrance to those efforts.

“I often ask my students, ‘If we went and seized the White House, would we be in power?’” he shares. “I think a lot of people understand that, no, we wouldn't because of the deeper structures that do exist.” Ciccariello-Maher explains that some thinkers believe “quick revolutions” don’t last and that the prospects of revolution have to rely on something with greater longevity.

“A long process of struggle in which those trying to overthrow the existing state of affairs develop themselves and establish an alternative: It may take longer, but it's much more likely to succeed in the long run,” Ciccariello-Maher says.

Taylor agrees, telling Teen Vogue that it is not enough simply to feel revolutionary energy to create a massive upheaval. She points to the way the black civil rights movement of the 1960s awakened a revolutionary consciousness that never fully coalesced. “By the end of that decade, millions of young people — black, white, [and] Latino — had come to the conclusion that the United States needed a revolutionary transformation,” she says. “Understanding the political dynamics of the 1960s opens our eyes to both the possibility of a radical political activity, but also an understanding that it's not automatic. Just because we might think it should happen, doesn't mean that it will.”

“It's not enough just to not want [systemic change],” she explains. “We have to be organized, we have to know our history, we have to politically understand why this is happening in order to bring together those tens of millions of people who are suffering to change those conditions.” She says that fostering solidarity across movements is essential to taking organizational efforts beyond resistance and rebellion into a broader coalition. For both Ciccariello-Maher and Taylor, another “R” word can actually be counterproductive to how rebellious and revolutionary energy progress: “reform.” Ciccariello-Maher characterizes a “reformist line” as something like, “We're going to get a bunch of people together by making small, small changes.” Taylor returns to the Ferguson and Baltimore examples to explain how reforms like police body cameras “pale in the terms of what is actually necessary to attend to the crises that cause people to erupt in such a dramatic way.”

Ciccariello-Maher says that moving along the spectrum from resistance through rebellion to revolution is possible and imperative for an organized leftist coalition to provide alternatives to “emergent global fascism and right-wing populism.”

“Understand that that resistance creates the basis for rebellion,” Ciccariello-Maher says. “And that those rebellions are crucial, they are important, they are essential to this change. When they come about, the point is not to denounce them or to encourage people not to be in the streets but instead to vote. We see people doing that; that's an attempt to contain rebellion and to channel it back into the existing system, not to resist it.” Ciccariello-Maher believes rebellion should not serve the status quo, but can help generate social revolution. Taylor, meanwhile, views revolutionary transformation as not just possible but necessary.

“I do think it is possible, and we don't have a choice. We don't have forever to try to figure this out,” Taylor says, pointing to how the impending doom of climate change is a context for other forms of oppression. She criticizes the idea that “we can keep stumbling along as a society,” saying, “Things get worse for people. They don't just stay as they are.”

Lähde: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/resistance-rebellion-revolution-explainer-interviews

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