Radical media, politics and culture.

"Patriarchy, Civilization and the Origins of Gender"

John Zerzan, Green Anarachy #16 (Spring 2004)

Civilization, very fundamentally, is the history of
the domination of nature and of women. Patriarchy
means rule over women and nature. Are the two
institutions at base synonymous?

Sergio Benvenuto Interviews Cornelius Castoriadis (1)

Psychomedia

Benvenuto: You are a philosopher of politics, but you are also a practicing psychoanalyst. Does your profession of analysis have an influence on your philosophical concepts?


Castoriadis: There is a very strong bond between my concept of psychoanalysis and my concept of politics. The aim of both is human autonomy, albeit via different processes. Politics aims at freeing the human being, making it possible for him to accede to his own autonomy through collective action. The prevailing concept during the 18th and 19th centuries (including that of Marx), according to which the object of politics was happiness, is a mistaken, even catastrophic, one. The object of politics is freedom. And politics is collectiveconscious and consideredaction, aimed at transforming institutions into institutions of freedom and autonomy.

hydrarchist writes:

London Demo Cancelled
Comments by Some Members of the Mayday Collective

Following a meeting held in mid-January the London Mayday
Collective decided not to proceed with plans for an anti-capitalist
event this year. This will be the first time in 5 years that there has
not been an event of its kind in London and we hope what follows
will help to explain the reasoning behind the decision and perhaps
begin some discussion into the prospects for planning future Mayday
events, keeping in mind what has gone before. What follows is a personal
reflection from a couple of participants in this year’s collective
rather than a statement issued by the group as a whole.

"Organized Networks"

Ned Rossiter, Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster

[Presented at The Life of Mobile Data: Technology, Mobility and Data Subjectivity conference, April 15-16, 2004, University of Surrey, England

Abstract

This paper is interested in how networks using ICTs as their primary
mode of organisation can be considered as new institutional forms.
The paper suggests that organised networks are emergent
socio-technical forms that arise from the limits of both tactical
media and more traditional institutional structures and architectonic
forms. Organised networks are peculiar for the ways in which they
address problems situated within the media form itself. The
organised network is thus one whose socio-technical relations are
immanent to, rather than supplements of, communications media. The
paper argues that the problematics of scale and sustainability are
the two key challenges faced by various forms of networks. The
organised network is distinct for the ways in which it has managed to
address such problematics in order to imbue informational relations
with a strategic potential.

Despised in their Own Country

Gideon Levi

How is it that Mordechai Vanunu is regarded as an admired hero in Western Europe, and in Israel he is slandered, cursed and despised by all? And if some public debate has risen around him - even though no significant part of the public regards him as a hero, as might have been expected from a genuine left - why is it that only a screaming, uniform chorus opposes the international peace activists and the handful of Israelis trying to stop the separation fence with their bodies: both literally and figuratively, lying along the fence on its current route in an effort that many in the world consider justified? Why isn't an alternative voice of appreciation being heard for these opponents of the regime, these dissidents?

sugarlover writes "Hi, I recently got out of prison, isn't that just wonderful...anyway, I find it interesting that I am a college student now and have found myself in psych, soc, and business classes and not for one moment does anyone ever speak of prisons. I would not speak there anyway, but our society has really developed this amazing legal machinery, and so much of our resources go into putting people behind bars... You would have to go to understand what it does to you. The effects of
incarceration. I never hear that term ever mentioned, in all my ten years there, reading books and newspapers. How do people change?
What happens when you put a bad check writer there and the person loses their family, home,
etc. Is what you do to that person equal to them
obtaining a few hundred dollars. When people go
to prison they lose everything. You could sit there and say "that's fair", but what you are really ending up with is a real angry person capable of doing much worst. It is just human nature. Not many people come out of there being better people. Trust me, I am not talking about
Christian Longo and Ward Weaver types, mostly
50 year old women that took money to help their
families, etc. Everyone should look at Vermont
and let those sort of people do yard work for the elderly, and other community service."

"Faith & Sanctuary"

Brian Burch


I was pleased to be asked to speak for a bit to provide some personal
reflections, historical and biblical, on the providing of sanctuary. My
remarks are inherently
from a Christian perspective, but there are similar views expressed by people
from other faith perspectives.

"Introduction to the Johnson-Forest Tendency

and the Background to Facing Reality"

Loren Goldner, Break Their Haughty Power

[Loren Goldner notes: The following text was written as a preface to a German translation of the 2002 text (cf. below)
to situate the background of the book Facing Reality and to present a short history of the Johnson-Forest
Tendency for the German context where it, as well as James, Dunayevskaya and Lee, are largely unknown.
It should therefore be understood as "Johnson-Forest For Beginners". I thank 6-7 friends and comrades who vetted the rough
draft for factual errors and omissions. Comment and critique are invited.]

While C.L.R. James (“Johnson”) (1901-1989) has become an academic fashion in the U.S. in the past 15 years (1), and is widely known in Britain and in the Caribbean, his name evokes little recognition in most of continental Europe except perhaps as the author of the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938).


Raya Dunayevskaya (“Forest”) (1910-1987), intimately associated with James from ca. 1940 until 1955, is still less known, aside from translations of her books Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg.


Least known of all is Grace Lee Boggs, (1915-   ), a Chinese-American woman who was the third founder and theoretician of what came to be known as the “Johnson-Forest tendency” of the Workers’ Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party in the U.S., a tendency whose influence has rippled far beyond its original small forces within two American Trotskyist groups before, during and after World War II.

Iraq Power Handover 'A Fraud'

Robert Fisk

[Transcript of an Australian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast with reporter Tony Jones, ABC]

TONY JONES: [...] The June 30th deadline now looks like it's going to be
postponed.

What will be the consequences if it is?

ROBERT FISK: Nothing. The handover is basically a fraud.

The governing council, which is appointed by the Americans, and which is the
Iraqi Government at the moment would merely be handing over to another group
of American-picked Iraqis.


They're not democratically elected, the new institution, whatever it is. We don't even know what it's going to be.

"The Metamorphosis of Telos:

A Splintered Journal Pokes Into Its Own Contradictions"

Danny Postel, In These Times (April 24-30, 1991)

Why would a journal that has described itself as "the philosophical conscience of the American left" and "a journal of radical thought" invite a senior contributing editor of The World & I — a publication of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times corporation—into its editorial circle? The journal is Telos, and its new comrade is Paul Gottfried, a self-described "reactionary" who has also written for such publications as Policy Review, the official magazine of the Heritage Foundation. Why would someone with Gottfried's politics be interested in a journal like Telos?

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