Plan C: Guillotines #1 – Organisation / Refusal

Introducing Guillotines: a beautiful new radical publication by Plan C, bringing a fresh cut of ideas/analysis/reflection in a world of terminal, accelerating crises and class and social movements struggling to find themselves. We hope the ideas contained within the 210 pages of this issue and future ones become useful contributions to shape each other and the insurgent movements that are required to emerge if we are to have any chance of making the world anew.  

Guillotines emerged following a period of collective discussions as we started a new phase of Plan C back in 2024. Coming ten years after our last publication, Guillotines captures a range of perspectives, experiences and reflections from the point of view of struggle and our place within them. In some ways, the questions we ask ourselves now aren’t altogether different to the ones we were asking then: questions about social reproduction, the politics of everyday life, the rise of the far-right and fascism, what it means to be a revolutionary organisation in the context of a complex world. Environmental politics have shifted from a peripheral position on the fringes of the left to one that is central to almost every revolutionary question. The shared experience of a global pandemic has opened up new and important questions around care, the democratisation of technology and science, and the very possibility of political organisation under conditions of catastrophe verging on social collapse The ongoing genocide in Palestine has already left an indelible scar on our political consciousness that will not be forgotten for the rest of our lives. We have borne witness to the stark contrast between images of an almost impossible brutality and the glib statements of world leaders, the press, and parts of civil society, even including some on the left, as they continue to lend moral and material support to Israel. We have been faced with the challenge of how to organise politically against such things when protest no longer seems to be enough, when the asymmetries of state and capitalist power seem too overwhelming to recoup the ambitions of revolutionary politics from the last century. 

No matter how hopeless our situation may at times seem, there remains the simple and constant truth that we must struggle, however we can, not simply as a matter of consoling ourselves that we are doing something, but with a genuine hope of winning. This publication, in the same vein, is not simply the outlet for a pent up and frustrated political scream. It is a call to action, to continue engaging in material struggle and to continue learning from the inevitable failures of that struggle so that we can learn to fail better.

CONTENTS
– Editorial
– There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
– Footnotes After a Year of Struggle
– Haunted by the Ghost of the Collective Subject
– Justice? Just Us!
– Memories of Movements: The Anarchist Train to the G8 in Scotland
– Left Discontent and Right Refusal
– Stick It to The Man
– What if They Called a Pogrom and Nobody Came?
– Three Notes on Thinking as an Organisation
– Beneath the Tombstones, the Beach: An Interview With John G., aka TheLitCritGuy

210 Full Color pages