voice s of re sistance from o ccupied lon d on
from a battle against developing a park, what had seemed to be just another losing fight amongst many. Those defending the city commons converged with almost the whole spectrum of social movements and were fueled by a visceral hatred of the police and a patriarchal prime minister. It became clear that revolts happen for psychic reasons as well as for material ones. Forecasters of social revolts (i.e. orthodox marxists) should learn this and many other lessons from June 2013 in Turkey. In fact, forecasting is both impossible and counterproductive: it is best to be prepared for social explosions rather than to attempt to predict them. Those of us who are part of anti-authoritarian and anti-state currents must always be ready to push revolts, like that of Istanbul, to their farthest limits and beyond. In moments like these, which promise to be more frequent around the globe, whoever is most organized is able to transmit their ideas and tactics in the most effective manner and become more potent within the rebellion. A further lesson concerns the ideal form of the revolutionary worker. Those who see the worker as the primary revolutionary agent must begin (as if they have not had sufficient reasons to do so already) to shift their gaze away from labor unions. Even the most leftist labor confederations in Turkey, such as DISK and KESK, were impotent in 20
propelling the movement into the realm of the economy. Although this is mostly no fault of their own and has more to do with the historical decimation of organized labor by the state in Turkey, it was also clear that beyond the classical factory or industrial worker, the formally unorganized, precarious, white-collar and diploma holding proletariat on the brink of unemployment now have the potential to take many initiatives in social revolts. Even the traditional blue collar proletariat might hold more revolutionary potential outside their workplaces, where they find themselves under the dominion of their unions. A crucial turning point for similar rebellions will come through the arrival of the antagonism from the squares and parks into the arena of commerce and work where this unorganized proletariat either already works at or at least is kept docile with the promise of working at. Turkey is not the only country where democracy, which is supposed to produce social peace and prosperity has had its alarm bells ringing. An even more dramatic example is Egypt where only a year after the democratic election of Morsi the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square came back in order to continue where they had left off. So much for the pundits who were quick to label the Egyptian January 25th movement as one purely