Reclaiming the revolutionary wisdom of the past is the title of a new contribution to the articles page of the orgrad website.
The first part of this piece is a general discussion of the relationship between radical politics and tradition.
This is largely informed by an interesting critique of Guy Debord and the Situationist movement by author Patrick Marcolini.
The second part of the article is a summary of the relationship to the past of all the thinkers featured on this website.
If you are looking for a handy glimpse of what lies behind the names listed and linked in our A-Z of Thinkers, this could be a good place to start.
One interesting aspect, which we don’t explore in the article itself, is the way in which threads of intellectual inspiration can be traced through the centuries.
For instance, if we take Debord as the starting point, he was an admirer of Novalis, who was himself hugely influenced by Plotinus.
And Plotinus sourced his own philosophy from his study of traditional Indian and Persian metaphysics at Alexandria.
Or, to take another thread, contemporary thinker Satish Kumar bases his worldview on the Vedic tradition.
He is also, like many others, influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, who was in turned inspired by Henry David Thoreau, who was influenced by the ancient Taoism of Chuang Tzu.
Chuang Tzu was also admired by Jaime Semprun, one of Debord’s comrades in the Situationist movement…
The interconnections are rich and numerous and of course reach out completely beyond the confines of what is described on this website!
organic radicals 
This is a concrete proof that human being is one race, the same aspiration for liberty. I would think of Laozi or even Siddharta Gautama as a starting point of anarchism
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