Mujawara: Weaving a Revolutionary Neighbourhood Beyond Borders

We could begin again with a list. A list of threats, of wars, of uprisings cut short, of incomplete revolutions. A list of all the dead, of all our dead.

But why state again what everyone knows, reads, sees, and feels: The world, once again, is devastated by the lust for power and the greed of the powerful.

So how do we carry on? We who have known the jubilant crowds, the ransacked palaces, and the power of our tenderness. How do we carry on in the face of horror and powerlessness? How do we carry on as revolutionaries?

There are the cynics, the “realists,” who, blinded by the anguish of their own weakness, tell us we must choose. Choose between those who massacre their own peoples and those who believe they can slow their own downfall by declaring war on the world.

There are those who give up or stop hoping. Exhausted, resigned. But who may one day stand with us again.

And then there is us.

Us who weep, us who feel weak, us who sometimes doubt. But us, too, who have not given up. Neither our compass, nor our flame. Neither the hope of avenging our own, nor the hope of seeing a dawn at the end of the night.

Us who, rather than remain trapped in the shock of the present, search everywhere for those who continue to resist. For we remember that from our uprisings, a force has awakened. And though minds tend to forget, bodies remember.

Us who see this force still alive in plain sight, carried by a pirate generation shouting in the world’s face that the game is not over.

It is this force that our comrades in Nepal have rekindled in the open, in flames that consumed their assembly. It is this force that we have glimpsed within the plenums of Serbia, those gigantic assemblies that, for months upon months, organised the revolt from below. It is this force too that is embodied in the inhabitants of Lebanese villages who remain on their land despite yet another evacuation order from the IDF, as well as in the farmers in Palestine who replant their crops again and again after the bombs. It is this force that we feel within the Sudanese emergency response rooms, born of war to take up the mantle, both at home and in exile, of the powerful resistance committees of the revolution.

It is this force that keeps our comrades standing firm in the jungles of Myanmar or Chiapas, in the Ukrainian trenches, and in the mountains of Rojhelat. It is this force that we see flying at the mastheads of those boats setting sail to defy genocidal Israel. It is this force, finally, that drives the crowds in Iran, Minneapolis, Peru, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco, and Madagascar to brave, time and again, the death promised by all these regimes that hate their peoples.

Yes, our strength is real. It is nascent, incomplete, fragmented, but real. Contrary to what counter-revolutionaries on both the right and the left would have us believe. And no party, no supreme saviour, will be able to unify it in our place.

So the task lies with us: to seek one another out, to recognise one another, and to make visible to the world—and to ourselves—the power that could emerge from our coming together.

This is what we call Mujawara. The pooling of our efforts and our resources, through the interweaving of ropes, long and strong enough to allow us to hold together in the face of the challenges of our time. A revolutionary neighbouring that we have already begun to weave from all these territories, these places, and popular powers born of our struggles. This Mujawara will not be made of empty talk or grand statements on every tremor our world experiences. It is being built, and will continue to be built, under the radar, in the tunnels of the revolutions to come.

And to inaugurate it, and to begin weaving this neighbouring that crosses borders, we will organise, across five continents and throughout the month of June, a series of internationalist actions within all these places born before or in the wake of our uprisings and maintained over the years despite every hardship: neighbouring councils, autonomous spaces, social centres, shelters, collective farms, self-managed bookshops, cooperatives.

All that will allow us to bring into being, materially and symbolically, this neighbouring we need: gatherings, actions, communal banquets, celebrations, fundraisers, marches, rituals in honour of those who have fallen.

From this global mutual aid that we will set in motion in June, new places will rise from the ground, safer paths will be forged, roofs will be repaired, new alliances will be woven, and from all of this, perhaps, wounds will be healed and new hopes will take root.

This moment is but a step—yet a decisive one: that of the slow but unwavering construction of a grounded material power, linking across the four corners of the planet the fragments of our nascent strength.

From the places we have grown accustomed to naming:

Taipei, Mexico City, the Beqaa, Berlin, Tokyo, Santiago, Galloway, London, Paris, Damascus, Provence, Kampala, Bilbao, Barcelona, Brussels, Toronto, Liège, the Limousin mountains, Athens, Cologne, Montreuil, Oregon and so many others …

tpw.mujawara@systemli.org