Radical media, politics and culture.

"Blues For Kurdistan"

David Martinez


We blow through Turkey in one day by car and plane, flying over the eastern regions’ snowy mountains…it looks beautiful down there and I want to return some day and see more. But not this trip, we only stop for lunch in TK, historically the capital of Kurdistan, and then we are into a car headed east, passing ancient towns built on hills that poke up from the green plains. We cross the border at Zakhu, into Iraqi Kurdistan, spend the night there and then go to Erbil.

The area is beautiful, with rolling hills and wide rivers swollen with snowmelt, craggy mountains looming behind capped with snow. The people here look more Central Asian, with wide windblown faces and red smiles, the men wearing the billowing pants tied with wide sashes that are the traditional outfit of the Kurds. They remind me of Palestinians in their pride and welcoming spirit. “You are American? You are welcome in Kurdistan.” The area has enjoyed a decade of semi-autonomy, with its own armed forces and passport controls, and has a sense of tranquility and happiness that is the polar opposite of Baghdad’s misery and social chaos.

Tacitus writes:

"In this fine article, probably familiar to some, HST looks at the ferment of declassed drop-outs that 'Mr. Mulford' (lawmaker) considered to be the ones causing all the trouble in Berkeley, Cal. at the time of the Free Speech movement... It seemed useful, and I couldn't find it anywhere online.

"The Nonstudent Left"

Hunter S. Thompson


BERKELEY, September 27, 1965 — At the height of the “Berkeley insurrection” press reports were loaded with mentions of outsiders, nonstudents and professional troublemakers. Terms like “Cal’s shadow college” and “Berkeley’s hidden community” became part of the journalistic lexicon. These people, it was said, were whipping the campus into a frenzy, goading the students to revolt, harassing the administration, and all the while working for their own fiendish ends. You could almost see them loping along the midnight streets with bags of seditious leaflets, strike orders, red banners of protest and cablegrams from Moscow, Peking or Havana. As in Mississippi and South Vietnam, outside agitators were said to be stirring up the locals, who wanted only to be left alone.

"Nietzsche and the Dervishes"

Hakim Bey, (Spring Equinox, 1989)

Rendan, "The Clever Ones." The sufis use a technical
term rend (adj. rendi, pl. rendan) to designate one
"clever enough to drink wine in secret without getting
caught": the dervish version of "Permissible
Dissimulation" (taqiyya, whereby Shiites are permitted
to lie about their true affiliation to avoid
persecution as well as advance the purpose of their
propaganda).

"On Security and Terror"

Giorgio Agamben, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20, 2001

Security as leading principle of state politics dates back to the the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society. But not until the 18th century does a thought of security come into its own. In a 1978 lecture at the College de France (which has yet to be published) Michel Foucault has shown how the political and economic practice of the Physiocrats opposes security to discipline and the law as instruments of governance.

Existential Marxism in Postwar France

Mark Poster (originally published in 1975)


My purpose in this study has been to trace the relationship of Marxism and existentialism as the dominant theme in recent French social thought. My thesis is that the two doctrines converged in Sartre and in the Arguments group, establishing the beginnings of a social theory of the New Left. Starting from the period right after World War II, when Marxism and existentialism were competing doctrines, I have described the movement of Sartre and his circle toward Marxism and the movement of Marxists away from Stalinism. By the mid-1960s there had been various attempts at a synthetic existential Marxism, all of which should be seen as tentative beginnings that might result in a major new social theory. In the final chapter, I test the new theory by using it to help us comprehend the events of May-June, 1968.


Existential Marxism emerges as a social theory suited to comprehend the conditions and the contradictions of advanced industrial society, to articulate the situation of various groups in this society, and to provide a new kind of theory for the human sciences that sees the scientist not as value-free or objective but as implicated in the object of his knowledge. Existential Marxism might thus be considered both as the "ideology" of an emerging radical coalition and as a theoretical advance in its own right.


My disciplinary orientation is that of the history of ideas which describes changing intellectual patterns with more concern for the relation of ideas to society than for the logical consistency of the ideas themselves. Hence I have not attempted a systematic exposition of New Left social theory, but have restricted myself, with minor exceptions, to articulating the theories of the French. It will be clear to the reader that I am sympathetic to the effort of the existential Marxists, although I am not committed to any particular version of their thinking. I adhere to their commitment to a radical restructuring of relations and institutions in advanced industrial society, and I am especially convinced of the value of their efforts to redefine the nature of the human sciences.


My study of their positions has challenged me to consider the limitations of intellectual history, but I have not deviated very far, in this work, from its traditional methodological boundaries. Finally, it is my hope that the study of the theoretical advances of the French will be of value to all those concerned about the present state of social theory in the human sciences and to all those in the United States who are beginning to confront their situation on a theoretical level.


This whole book is available online here.

"Peasant Power in Bolivia"

Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times March 31, 2004

A fragile government in La Paz is further weakened as more and more
indigenous people rise up and take control of their villages.


SORATA, Bolivia — The police won't return to this village in the Andes
unless the peasants promise not to throw rocks at them.


The peasants rose up and chased the police out months ago, along with
the local representative of the provincial government, the judges and
even the army. The authorities fled Sept. 20 in the face of a crowd of
Aymara Indians armed with little more than sticks and stones, enraged by
an insult uttered by an army general hours earlier, and moved by
centuries of pent-up frustration.

"Iraq's False Promises"

Slavoj Zizek, Foreign Policy, January/February 2004


If you want to understand why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, not the National Security Strategy of the United States. Only the twisted logic of dreams can explain why the United States thinks that the aggressive pursuit of contradictory goals-promoting democracy, affirming U.S. hegemony, and ensuring stable energy supplies-will produce success.

"Thought Control for Middle East Studies"

Joel Beinin, CommonDreams.org

A band of neoconservative pundits with close ties to
Israel have mounted a campaign against American
scholars who study the Middle East. Martin Kramer, an
Israeli-American and former director of the Dayan
Center for Middle East Studies at Tel-Aviv University,
has led the way in blaming these scholars for failing
to warn the American public about the dangers of
radical Islam, claiming they bear some of the
responsibility for what befell us on September 11. In
2003, proponents of this position took their complaints
to Congress. The Senate is expected to review them
soon, as it discusses the Higher Education
Reauthorization bill.

Foucault, Marxism and History

Mark Poster (First published, 1984)

This book is intended as a set of essays examining the value of the recent works of Michel Foucault for social theory and social history. Foucault's works written since 1968 (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality and numerous shorter pieces) contain some important advances in social theory and in the writing of social history. My purpose is to separate out those advances from other features of Foucault's thought which I find less beneficial. I am not attempting to give an assessment of Foucault's work as a whole but to focus on and analyze certain features of it.


To that end I situate Foucault's work in a double problematic: those of critical social theory and a new social formation that I call the mode of information. Although Foucault's politics may be ambiguous, his works are profitably situated in relation to critical theory. He provides, I will argue, models of analysis that contain theoretical elements which, properly interpreted, open up new directions for critical theory, directions that can lead it out of its current impasses. But these new directions only become apparent when certain important changes in the social formation of advanced trial society are recognized. To that end I have coined the somewhat infelicitous phrase 'mode of information' to represent these changes and to contrast the current situation to Marx's concept of the mode of production.

Whole book is online here.

Che Guevara, Paulo Friere and the Politics of Hope:
Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy

by Peter Maclaren

On a recent voyage to the rain forests of Costa Rica, I rode a bus through
the beautiful city of Cartago. From my window I noticed a young man with a
long ponytail running beside the bus. As the bus passed him, he glanced up
and our eyes momentarily met; I noticed that he was wearing a Che T-shirt
with the inscription ‘¡Che Vive!’. A fleeting sensation of plaintive
connectedness overcame me, and I managed to give him a quick ‘thumbs-up’
gesture of affirmation just in time for him to return a broad smile to the
crazy gringo. For a brief moment, I felt that this ponytailed stranger and I
were linked by a project larger than both of us. During that instant, I
could tangibly sense between us a collective yearning for a world free from
the burdens of this one, and I knew that I was not alone. The image of Che
that he wore on his breast like a secular Panagia pointed to a realm of
revolutionary values held in trust by all those who wish to break the chains
of capital and be free. Che has a way of connecting—if only in this
whimsical way—people who share a common resolve to fight injustice and to
liberate the world from cruelty and exploitation. There was no way of
knowing the politics of this young man and how seriously he identified with
the life and teachings of El Che. But Che’s image brings out the promise of
such a connection and the political fecundity of even this momentary
reverie.

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