The essay aims to rethink terms like realism, imagination, alienation, bureaucracy, revolution itself. It was conceived on the basis of some six years of involvement with the alternative globalization movement and particularly with its most radical, anarchist, direct action-oriented elements. It is a kind of a preliminary theoretical report. The author asks, among other things, why is it these terms, which for most of us seem to evoke long-since forgotten debates of the 1960s, still resonate in those circles? Why is it that the idea of any radical social transformation so often seems “unrealistic”? What does revolution mean once one no longer expects a single, cataclysmic break with past structures of oppression?
