UNREST MAGAZINE

Please join Unrest Magazine and the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution (CNCR) for a special film screening of How to Start a Revolution.  The film is a documentary about Gene Sharp, author of From Dictatorship to Democracy, whose work has inspired activists all over the world:  from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to Egypt and the Arab Spring to social activists in the United States.  The film explores how Sharp’s ideas work in both theory and practice using extended interviews with Sharp, his assistant, his followers, and leaders of revolutionary movements worldwide, as well as user-generated content from around the globe, to reveal the power of nonviolent revolution on the streets.
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“To protect my position, my corner, my lair,
 while we out here, say the hustler’s prayer.
 If the game shakes me or break me 
I hope it makes me a better man,
 take a better stand.
 Put money in my mom’s hand,
 get my daughter this college plan
 so she don’t need no man.
 Stay far from timid.
 Only make movies when ya heart’s in it,
 and live the phrase ‘sky’s the limit.’” 

- Christopher George Latore Wallace (1997) [1]

In our constantly reinterpreted and adapted anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and anti-Statist critique of the modern world, we the so-called “radical Left,” scorn bankers, romanticize poverty, and vandalize the machines that convert our hourly labors into paper bills.  We have a de facto antagonism toward those who earn above the average, and with good cause, as much of this is due directly to the hierarchy of the boss-worker relationship.  We hate “the rich” and the “one percent.”

Though this essay does not seek to apologize for the management and owning class, it does attempt to pose a more challenging question about our relationship to work and survival: What about those of us who make our way through capitalism by exploiting not our neighbors or coworkers, but the outside margins of ‘less than fully regulated’ economies?  What about those who seek to work less, yet earn more because they choose to operate in a sphere of employment that exists in between legal and illegal, regulated and unregulated, socially accepted and stigmatized? 
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It may seem strange, that in the first issue of a magazine devoted to theory, there is discussion of practice. Especially when Critical Conflict Theory (CCT) is a new idea just breaking onto the scene. Furthermore, CCT is yet to be well defined; hence the purpose of Unrest and the essays contained within issue zero. However, even as CCT is new, ill defined and entangled within a whole host of other theories, there are examples of people whose theory in use is primarily critical, even if it is not the espoused theory. Furthermore, illumination into Critical Conflict Engagement (the practice of CCT) may be useful to those interested in further developing or even adopting CCT as a dominant, or at least useful, theoretical frame. After all, as Jawaharlal Nehru put it “A theory must be tempered with reality.”
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