It was never downright illegal to be LGBTQ in Turkey but there is no legislation against discrimination and hate crime, which makes life very precarious for queers. In fact, Turkey is one of the countries with the highest number of trans murders. Also, there are instances where the basic rights of trans people have been hijacked, like when a famous trans singer was banned from going on stage in the 1980s. More recently, trans individuals were fined for “exhibitionism” for merely going about their lives in the clothing of the gender they identify with. Although NGOs fighting for LGBTQ rights have been working diligently for over two decades, society is still homophobic and transphobic. While the queer community has feminist, anarchist and leftist allies, these supporters have a problematic relationship with LGBTQ politics, to say the least. The Gezi movement was an important moment in spreading coalition. We personally joined the Gezi movement because we were afraid that, the way things were going, we would not be able to do the Pride parade. It all started with the ban of International Labour Day demonstrations that take place on the 1st of May each year. The government closed down public transport and traffic in major bridges, roads and so on, to prevent people from reaching Taksim square where the demonstrations were going to take place and where Gezi Park is situated. Then, throughout May, not a single demonstration could happen on Istiklal Street (the street that leads to Taksim square and Gezi Park), where there is usually at least one demonstration daily. Whenever a group holding a sign came together, even if it was just five people, the police used gas. This street is also where the Pride parade is held every year. So, by the end of May, when the Gezi movement started, we joined in to defend not only Pride but public assembly in general. The LGBTQ community had also specific reasons for defending Gezi Park against demolition as the park is a cruising area for gay men. When a very wide spectrum of people came together at Gezi, most of them had never even met a LGBTQ person before, yet, they ended up resisting side by side. The Gezi movement was dispersed very violently by the end of June but, paradoxically, when we still took to the streets for the Pride parade on the last Sunday of June, no one cared to stop us. Considering the preceding violence towards public protest, that was the first occasion that a demonstration was not stopped. So, with the Gezi protestors joining us, Pride 2013 became the biggest to date with over fifty thousand people.

No one is coming to save you, Comrade.
Nobody.
There is no revolution on the horizon, there is no party, there is no grand idea that will finally awaken humanity to its potential and free us from our chains.
There is no vanguard, no purpose, no secret method we can all use to magically make the powerful resign themselves to the fate of ordinary existence.
There have been pretenders. There are priests and pimps and false gods that call on you to worship them. They will give you immortal “sciences” and identities, they will assure you if just enough people donned the uniform or spoke the right words everything would be okay.
There are those of course who would deny you even that, who refuse any action without every detail planned out. Who will run the schools, who will build the roads, how will tire fires and blockades raise our carbon footprint?
They will call your plans starry-eyed, impractical, an Insurrecionist fantasy.
They say this half-asleep.
They, so wise, snore and say they will “wait for the people to rise.” The people have risen and been crushed. Occupy failed, Standing Rock failed. All that’s left is you and me.
They, so strong, snore and say they wait for their rights to be taken, the right to assembly or the right to vote an invisible line they shan’t abide. Where where they for the Patriot Act, the NDAA? They petitioned, they moaned, they lost.
They say they are waiting for some grand event in a universe with millions of them everyday. Each day the criteria changes, each day they grow more stagnant and old.
Everybody is waiting and nobody wants to start, everybody wants to join and nobody wants to build. Everybody is waiting for a grand and general revolt, yet steal an apple or burn a cop car and they’ll call you an “adventurist.”
Everybody is sure change is right around the corner, that divine powers will steer us the right way. Everybody is sure time is on our side, that the good gals will always win and that things can’t hold out much longer. Everybody says a revolution is very possible with no bloodshed and no heart feelings, that everyone will be heard and cared for.
Everybody is sure that the revolution will come like an amazon package: quick, clean, and ready to be enjoyed right at their doorstep. They have children you see, and must put them first, but will gladly step over your body after you’ve built the road for them to walk on.
Everybody is waiting. Waiting for something. Waiting for somebody, somebody to save them.
They aren’t coming to save you, Comrade.
Nobody is.
Those people are going to die just as they lived. They are going to stay right where they are, on the couch, and play pretend online because it costs them nothing. Like a ball gag slipped on for “special nights,” politics is the kink that makes them feel different.
They always talk alot about feelings, how much “solidarity” they give and need. Every time a black child lies in a pool of his own blood they really feel bad. Truly. But they have jobs you see, and families, and shows to watch and cars to maintain.
They will hurt for you comrade when you lose your job. Why, they’ll call for a General Strike and make posters, badges, and pins! Provided it’s a weekend and not a holiday of course, and with enough advance notice to ask for it off.
They are growing to grow old, these people, happy with the knowledge that if they had the chance they would have done something spectacular. They will have fun little funerals, not sad ones, where mediocre lives will be celebrated by talking about how “brave” they were and how “hard” they fought for freedom.
Who’s is never mentioned, how and where politely not discussed.
There are millions of them, Comrade. Always have been. Always will be. They are going to be born, squirm around for a bit, and go right back into the hole they crawled out of.
They look to be led, watch to see what they can join, and wait patiently for someone to shove food into their mouths and help them chew.
Will you wait for them, Comrade?
Will you wait for the same people who prefer for YOU to suffer and YOU to die so that they can play risk free?
Will you wait for the people who will not lift a finger to aid you until they can’t get in trouble and all the hiccups have been worked out?
Will you wait and draw up plans to convince those who need convincing, who won’t move an inch until we’re sure how many trees will be planted at every school that is suddenly free for the deaf and the blind?
Will you wait for the people who call your actions a sin as they pray in front of police batons?
Will you wait for the entire planet to agree to an idea, a monumental event that would be the first in our history?
Are you prepared, dear comrade, to die just as they will, surrounded by cheap party favors and even cheaper music as your friends sing hymns to a banal existence?
Or will you act?
Don’t mistake me for a fool comrade, I hope you aren’t one either. I don’t want to die and I don’t want to go to jail. I have no use for being a martyr because I want to be free, just like you do.
But if you are prepared to act, to put aside the arguments and to truly build, then perhaps we have a chance. You and I. I’m done talking about them.
What if we focused on getting free? What if we built the structures we needed to do so? What if instead of arguing about hairstyles or flag colors we argued about crops to plant or stores to rob? What if we made a union, a gang, devoted to getting free? What if we stopped arguing online and set about becoming real comrades, the kind that can hide each other from the police and offer a safe place to stay?
What if we could rely on one another so well that I knew I was safe wherever I went because an injury to one really was an injury to all? What if we didn’t wait for an apocalyptic war and instead waged OUR war everyday, a war against everything that enslaved us?
What if we did that? What if we put away the theories and focused on that? Why not? Why wait?
Nobody is coming to save us, Comrade.
Nobody.
So it’s up to you and me.

In recent years much has been written about non-white women and men’s participation in the various revolutions. Even if this literature were to be doubled or tripled, however, without renewed thinking about the concept of revolution, a reconstruction of lost pieces of the puzzle will not shake the idea of regime that has been stabilized out of the existing concept of revolution. Construction of a new regime means demarcating the sphere of sovereignty, declaring the end of revolution and establishing who is entitled to citizenship and who is not. A new conceptualization of revolution must then account for these three factors: space, time and body politic, and for the great power of those oppressive regimes that were constructed out of the eighteenth-century revolutions to render self-evident the identification of revolution with self-determination and liberty.  Regime change is actually limited to the plane of ruling power and its institutions. The differential body politic of the governed people became irrelevant to a conceptualization of regime and revolution. The time has come, then, to think the concept of revolution out of the ongoing distress of flawed civil existence under those democratic regimes that were produced by the great revolutions of the eighteenth century and out of the regime-made disasters they have never ceased to produce while disseminating their mission throughout the world to overcome dark regimes.

It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.

The efficacy of political art has been called into question under the hegemony of multinational capitalism, the cultural logic of which goes by the name of postmodernism. Now that the critical or aesthetic distance necessary for an oppositional cultural politics, a politics which positions “the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault the last,” no longer obtains due to the implosion of the base and the superstructure and the subsequent loss of the “semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere” as Capital has increasingly saturated what Habermas calls the life-world, we are confronted with a situation in which art no longer has a political, emancipatory function, but is rather just one more “pop” in an all pervasive pop-culture, what Debord calls the “society of the spectacle”

The left, as we have known it, as important as it has been, cannot remain the same force until it adequately counters these developments. Therefore it is important for the left to recognise that the constitution of the global working classes is very different now. In many ways the left is still dealing with this notion of the working classes as male, or white male, as in the case of the US. I think feminism, radical feminism, radical anti-racist and anti-capitalist feminism helps us to do the reconceptualisation that is necessary in order to produce a left that is more in line with the vast changes that have occurred in the era of global capitalism, recognising the feminisation of the working class, the structural shifts in the global economy, of the fact that some industries are largely populated by women, industries that rely on reproductive labour, of care industries, domestic service, health care, etc. It seems to me that in many ways, unions around the world are not willing to recognise those changes. To organise the unorganised, at this moment, is to organise women.

Всичко тръгна от една дума.
Но преди да изрека думата, нека да я премълча, за да и отворя пространство и време. Защото какво е една дума сама по себи си без мълчанието около нея, което създава подслойно ехо? Нека изчакам и прозования от нея речев ручей. Защото какво е една самотна дума без верижно слово, която я умножава, преобразява до двузначност  до многозначност, а при стечение на някакви извънредни обстоятелства - и до всезначност.

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Whereas the smaller bloc of the left has hardened its old positions, as if nothing happened after the end of the Cold War, and with time its attitudes and methods became of the same nature as that of the Taliban-Jihadis or dogmatic closed-minded sectarians, or even that of terrorist “Bin Ladenites,” in its blind defiance of the West, global capitalism (a global capitalism that Russia and China are now a part of) and imperialism. This bloc from the left, in the Arab world and internationally, is today the most hostile to the Syrian revolution and the closest to defending the tyrannical military-security-familial regime using several arguments, not least of which is that the entire world plotted, apparently, against this regime that is peace-loving and stable. This type of leftist emphasizes “the game of nations” and “geopolitical analysis,” with stories of collision of interests and plans of the great powers and their dominance in our region, and does not want to view the revolution in Syria through anything other than through this lens, and neglects all that happens inside Syria and to Syria’s revolutionaries today, as well as ignoring all the reasons that led its people to a peaceful revolution, and later to taking up arms in the face of a “nationalist” tyranny that is allied with this kind of leftist. In other words, this leftist has no problem with sacrificing Syria if it leads to a victory being handed to their international camp and “geopolitics” that wants a global victory in the “game of nations.” Their first priority is not Syria or its people in revolt to restore the republic, their freedom, and their dignity, but the game of nations at the global level of analysis and the side that they want to win.

I think that people who say that to you are disavowing the truth, in the sense that they don’t want to appear to you as if they like all the hateful things he says. They just think: He will close the borders, he will go to war, or he will cut through the red tape in government. But the fact is: they are willing to live with the hateful things he says. They don’t necessarily agree, but they accommodate it, which means that they do not object. They are implicitly lending their consent to that discourse. Many people are taking private pleasure in his discourse. They may not be able to say that out-loud, because we are supposed to be ashamed of being racist, or being sexist, or being homophobic. But they harbour those feelings privately.

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

Today’s homosexual does not embody polymorphic desire: he moves univocally beneath an equivocal mask.  His sexual objects have already been chosen by social or political machination, and they are always the same: either weaker or stronger, older or younger, more in love with him or he more in love with them, more bourgeois or more proletarian, primitive or intellectualized, uber-male or sub-male, black or white, Arab or Viking, top or bottom, and so forth.  Politics has already done its underground work.  If, to boot, consciousness gets involved in political struggle, then the heterosexual and exogamic tendencies of today’s homosexuality will become a caricature, and we will see more and more cases where a dick can only make love to a head and a head to a dick.