Revolutions of Our Times

The Peoples Want is a network of collectives, organizations, and individuals from across the world working together to build a new internationalism that promotes solidarity and mutual aid among those in struggle.

"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

• PrologueHow this manifesto came to be through a series of transnational gatherings attended by internationalists from around the globe.Recognizing OurselvesFrom continent to continent, from our exile, in our travels and in our struggles, we have found each other.Birth of Our PowerThe uprisings of our time have shown that there is no singular global revolutionary subject, but many, and the revolts have been led, above all, by those on the margins.Finding the Emergency BreakThe beginning of this decade underlines a simple but painful truth: as revolution progresses, so counter-revolution grows harsher.Turning Exile into a Position of AttackEvery attempt at revolution, every insurrection, leaves in its wake a new generation of exiled revolutionariesInternationalism from BelowSeeing Western countries as the only imperialist powers, and the United States as the source of all evil, a characteristic bias of “campist” positions, leads many on the left to excuse the crimes of the Syrian, Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and other regimes.The Fall of EmpireHow can we avoid abandoning the idea of power to the people? How can we combat the sham of liberal democracies without playing into the hands of authoritarian regimes?Revolution?No single event can put an end to all forms of domination; we must view revolution instead as a process.Starting OverWe stand at a crossroads where aspirations for change confront realities of a collapsing world. We need to find a revolutionary horizon, not just in order to survive, but to live a life worth living.