Book Review: Armed With History: Themes in Global Revolutionary Organizing Works

Violent Globalism: Hegemony’s Selective Memory

We cannot understand revolutions without acknowledging the circumstances that necessitated them. Most often, these uprisings are responses to one of Earth’s oldest forms of globalization: colonialism. The reviewed works explicitly name the violent influences of colonial power—in the forms of both settlerism and imperialism—on the movements they describe. (Prashad, 2020) wrote of resistance to conquest:

Gradually, and with intensity, the movements for national liberation grew across the colonized world. These movements did not merely demand political freedom against colonial regimes. We are part of the human race, they said, and therefore we are part of universal ideas of freedom and humanity… This was the essence of the resolutions that emerged from the League Against Imperialism meeting held in Brussels in 1927–28… Nothing, it was felt, can stand in the way of the demands of humanity to walk freely onto the stage of history. (pp. 61-62)

Dehumanization is the essence of colonialism. So, when the League Against Imperialism fought for a recognition of their collective humanity, the colonizers denied them. In the face of denial, revolutionaries continued the fight. This history is shared by many of the world’s (post)colonized people, the Kurdish fighters in Rojava included. In the Women’s War podcast, Evans details the history of Kurdish ethnic oppression under the Ottoman Empire; deportation and exile only scratch the surface of the horrors experienced under colonial rule.

When many of these peoples gained their sovereignty, they were still barraged by hegemons who sought to keep them as subjects in all but name. After two World Wars and several revolutions in the Global South, imperialists shifted their strategies of repression. In 1945, the United Nations’ founding Charter established ground rules for global interaction. This Charter appointed permanent Security Council members and gave them power to determine which movements constituted threats to global peace and with what level of force they should be met. As Prashad notes, “… the UN Charter provided the legal framework for lawless interventionism”, a pivotal moment in the legal reification of anti-revolutionary violence (p. 70). Prashad refers to this as “lawfare”, a way to signal that over time, violence is baked into organizations that claim to prevent it. This subtlety means that brutality does not always look like the barrel of a gun in the trenches of war. Through lawfare, brutality is as simple as a directive on UN letterhead.

The member nations that granted this decision-making capacity were the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. These nations were already international forces, each with their own complex histories of colonization and repression of the masses. In Löwy’s Revolutions, the chapter on the Chinese Revolution illustrates how forces against the rural proletarian organizers were ostensibly imported from major Chinese cities and the government’s anti-communist allies to quash local struggles for liberation. This, alongside CIA missions “liberating” the Global South (Washington Bullets) and Western aid organizations “spreading democracy” in Muslim-majority nations (The Women’s War), demonstrates how the global/local tensions at play in revolutionary movements follow a fairly standard narrative: the dominating global force infiltrates the radical site. For many movements working toward sovereignty, globalization is a term loaded with violence. As such, international organizations and state bodies with widespread authority must be situated within their problematic histories.

As we tease out the insidious origins of our most prominent international actors, we must also revisit our labels for such organizations and their antagonists. Prashad reminds us, facetiously: “The colonizer is civilized, even in his brutality. The colonizer can never be the terrorist” (p. 55). The organizations who are marked “terrorist” are those deemed threats by powers like the United Nations and the hegemons who wrote the rules. The Zapatistas in 1994 Chiapas, Mexico received this brand, as did many Cold War-era Latin American socialists – as Löwy documents in his photographic anthology, pictures made it even easier to vilify revolutionary movements, as the faces of leaders and fighters now circulated globally. Evans’ early podcast episodes explore how the label of “terrorist” is applied to Rojava’s military units just as frequently as the term “freedom fighters”. The United States tends to gravitate more toward the former, Evans explains, because of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Turkey’s membership therein. Although Turkey is notorious for its systemic oppression of Kurdish people, the United States would violate NATO’s terms if they sided with Rojava’s militants in any meaningful, material way.

By exploring the history of revolutionary movements and their relationship to globalism, it becomes clear that the international stage is built on a foundation of violence. Though some may try, it is impossible to wash the blood off this origin story. Importantly, this can extend work on intellectual history in organizational studies. The canon(s) of organizational communication/organization studies and management have undeniably been purified of coloniality (Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006), not to mention anti-Blackness and imperialism. In the United States specifically, (Redding, 1985) recounts how the nation’s military-industrial complex influenced the discipline and disciplining of organizational communication. Our interrelated fields have undeniable connections to force and violence. Though these works are not specific to organization studies, they can direct us to historical through-lines that force an unpacking and reckoning with these unsettling truths.

Sociomaterial Entanglement: The Revolution Will Be Imbricated

For the past two decades, give or take, organizational scholarship has begun to embrace relational ontologies via the communicative constitution of organizations, or CCO (Kuhn & Schoeneborn, 2015). This paradigm has recently been critiqued for its lack of engagement with power (Mease, 2021; Kuhn, 2021). Importantly, the reviewed works will therefore be valuable for CCO scholars, as they engage relationality from critical standpoints.

Textual agency is often an element of CCO analyses, and these works demonstrate the entanglement of object agents with human organizers. For instance, photography is invoked across all works as an organizational catalyst. As a photographic anthology, Löwy’s Revolutions is unsurprisingly filled with photographs from revolutionary efforts across the world. The anthology notes that the first proletarian uprising captured by a camera was the 1848 French Revolution. Out of this movement emerged an iconic photo of revolutionaries behind an enduring organizing strategy – the makeshift barricade. As Löwy noted, this material symbol came to represent the “act of insurrection” in the decades since the 1848 barricade was immortalized with the day’s newest technology (Löwy, 2020, p. 11).

Since then, the globalization of media and proliferation of new technologies has continued to circulate revolutionary imagery. In the 21st Century, Rojava’s armed forces gained international attention through social media:

You’ve probably seen videos and pictures of their fighters… young women bedecked in colorful keffiyehs, riding into battle against the Islamic State. Such images made for easy, feel-good coverage for a region where those stories are hard to come by… That’s more or less the story everybody knows: Kurds fighting ISIS, then Turkey and ISIS. (Evans, 2020, Ep. 1)

Evans fervently argues that this content is not even close to fully representative of Rojava’s revolutionary efforts, but because the images were widely circulated, they organized a particular frame of thinking about the revolutionaries in the minds of outsiders. As narrated by the authors reviewed here, media artifacts are agents of revolutions in (un)intentional ways.

Just as material agents empower or spotlight movements, they are also used against revolutionaries. Photographs of the dead, for instance, were warnings against continued uprisings. Löwy’s chapter on the Mexican Revolution detailed: “The last picture of [Emiliano] Zapata is his corpse; it was taken to put an end to any rumor that he had survived” (p. 270). Moreover, per Prashad, representations of the bullets used to end the lives of radicals proved effective in disorganizing communities. Beyond their literal forms, bullets were represented by the veiled threats of bureaucrats and people starved by sanctions. These objects of repression weighed heavily on the masses:

Their confidence begins to falter. Those who came from them, organized them, spoke for them, either now dead or, if not dead, too scared to stand up, too isolated, too rattled, their sense of strength, their sense of dignity, compromised by this bullet or that. (Prashad, 2020, p. 17)

This materially-constituted subjugation extends to built environments. In The Women’s War, Evans recounted his journey through parts of Syria formerly controlled by ISIS and damaged by US intervention. The former ISIS capital, Raqqa, is the “most destroyed city in modern times,” (Evans, 2020, Ep. 6). Raqqa and its surrounding cities were left without support. One of Evans’ interlocutors explained that ISIS offered residents the resources to survive if they pledged allegiance to their cause. Of course, individuals only have the illusion of choice when their options are to join a terror cell or starve. This vignette highlights the ways in which material conditions dictate organizational membership; the social and tangible, locked in a gruesome entanglement.

Artifacts of revolution have co-constitutive agency with (counter)revolutionaries and their organizations. “They speak to us about the past, and about a possible future,” (Löwy, 2020, p. 17). Organizational scholars invested in relational ontology—CCO, specifically—may find value in these works and their lessons on authority, power, and structure, and as they relate to social imbrication with materiality. Apart from CCO, this sociomaterial entanglement makes a strong case for visual methods within organizational studies. Shortt and Warren (2019), for instance, make a case for photographic methodologies through grounded visual pattern analysis (GVPA) ¹ . Their method, combined with images of revolution, may elucidate unique findings about organizing.

Organizational Learning as “Armament”: Beyond the Gun

“Armament” is traditionally associated with weaponry, but it is better situated within a broader context. As Prashad explained in an interview about his book with the Guerilla History podcast (Hakamaki et al., 2020), while “arming” the people may include physical self-defense tools (i.e. the gun), armament is the holistic process of preparing the masses for revolutionary efforts against oppression. Movements cannot sustain themselves without strategies and resources; as time progresses, lessons must be passed down to the next generations. In this way, armament is a form of organizational learning.

Education is a core tenet of many global revolutionary movements. Revolution in Cuba began with nationwide literacy campaigns; the priority was to provide the proletariat with free-flowing information and foundational political knowledge (Revolutions). The proliferation of liberatory concepts is also central to Rojava’s organizational structure. Evans recounts the origins of the movement beginning with one of its founding members, Abdullah Öcalan. Inspired by the principle of libertarian municipalism, ² Öcalan adapted the anti-capitalist theory of horizontalism to the needs of Kurdish peoples. Central to Rojava’s interpretation of libertarian municipalism is the belief that capitalism and hegemony cannot be meaningfully dismantled without full gender equality. Evans explains:

The oppression of the patriarchal system extends past just legal codes and religious rules and into the realms of what we’d call the social sciences. Jineology ³ then is the process by which women re-evaluate history, economics, art, education, health and many other things in an attempt to cast off male-centred biases. On a societal level, advocates of Jineology hope this will lead to a more equitable civilization and a more accurate understanding of the world… A line written on the walls of [a Rojavan city] states: “Until women educate and empower themselves, no one is free.” (Evans, 2020, Ep. 4)

Thus, over time, gender equity has embedded itself into Rojava’s (organizational) culture. Evans’ interlocutors acknowledged that the change is gradual and incomplete, but their learning principles have been effective thus far.

Prashad argues in Washington Bullets that 21st Century revolutions are matters of public health and environmental salvation. Our climate is deteriorating at an unfathomable rate, we are living through compounding health crises, and the violent nature of global capitalism exacerbates these horrors. As imperialist powers criminalize revolutionary organizations through aid sanctions and militarization, the only saviors on which the proletariat may rely are themselves and their comrades. Cooperative care is not a new phenomenon in revolutions; Löwy’s photographic archive displays images of community members across the globe exhibiting their solidarity for causes, from providing medical aid and meals, farm land, and firearms. In Rojava, collective care is baked into the constitution, and the physical environment is considered part of their community. Through his work on The Women’s War, Evans had the opportunity to visit one of Rojava’s many community gardens, most of which operate as worker cooperatives. In addition to agricultural sustainability measures, the governing documents of Rojava prioritize restorative justice measures and shared leadership responsibilities. Evans noted that most of Rojava’s adults are prepared to defend their community in the event of an invasion by the Turkish military, Syrian forces, or even UN-backed insurgents. These flexible, vigilant structures are not automatic; they require labor and constant (re)learning.

The works reviewed here make clear that armament is about more than just taking up the gun. Organizational learning in global revolutionary movements is mindful, collaborative, and adaptable. These characteristics are strikingly similar to those lauded by high reliability organizations (HROs), so scholars thereof may find particular merit in these works and the strategies implemented by the collectives described. Though proletarian uprisings are significantly different than traditional HROs, their similarities in organizational learning require us to ponder how we define HRO and if there is room to expand our theorizing to encompass alternative organizational forms. HROs are characterized by a preoccupation with failure (Roberts & Bea, 2001), and failure for global revolutionary organizers almost certainly means damnation for their people. Including these organizations in our HRO taxonomy requires us to consider the differing stakes of reliability lapses for oppressed collectives. It might also force HRO scholars to contend with how traditionally studied sites (i.e., military vessels, nuclear power plants, etc.) often contribute to the subjugation of subaltern groups.