Radical media, politics and culture.

"Post-Anarchism Anarchy"

Hakim Bey (1987)

The Association for Ontological Anarchy gathers in
conclave, black turbans & shimmering robes, sprawled
on shirazi carpets sipping bitter coffee, smoking long
chibouk & sibsi. Question: What's our position on all
these recent defections & desertions from anarchism
(esp. in California-Land): condemn or condone? Purge
them or hail them as advance-guard? Gnostic elite...or
traitors?

"What's Wrong With Postanarchism?"

Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur


What is now being called 'postanarchism' by some
thinkers, including Saul Newman, can take on many
forms, but the term generally refers to an attempt to
marry the best aspects of poststructuralist philosophy
and the anarchist tradition. One way to read the word,
thus, is as a composite: poststructuralism and
anarchism. However, the term also suggests that the
post- prefix applies to its new object as
well, implying that anarchism, at least as heretofore
thought and practiced, is somehow obsolete.


Together,
these two senses of the word form a narrative: an
aging, spent force (anarchism) is to be saved from
obsolescence and irrelevance by being fused with a
fresh, vital force (poststructuralism). We would like
to question this narrative's assumptions and
teleology, but not without some appreciation of what
it has to offer.

"Workers and Capital"

Mario Tronti

The Progressive Era

The working class after Marx can be approached historically in two ways. One is chronological. It reconstructs the great cycles of the labor struggle from the 1870s, followed by a series of facts that constitute its history. It would include the history of labor in industry, of industry in capital, of capital in politics and in political events, along with the great theorization -- what was once called the history of ideas -- the first sociology, the last systematic form attained by economics, and the birth of a new scientific discipline: that theory of technological reality which is the science of labor and the enemy of the worker. Traditional historiography encapsulates it between 1870 and 1914. To be generous and to avoid constantly upsetting the mental habits of the average intellectual, it may even be possible to enclose this epoch's first great block of facts in "their" history and move towards us and the new labor struggles constituting the real political drama of our side of the story -- even if it is only at its beginning


The other approach is to move through great historical events by pausing on macroscopic groups of facts yet untouched by the critical consciousness of labor thought (Pensiero operaio) and therefore excluded from a class understanding that translates them into a political use of their consequences. When relevant, these events isolate a fundamental aspect of capitalist society. They cut a cross-section that goes from a series of struggles to a set of political-institutional, scientific, or organizational answers.

"Can the Subaltern Speak German?
On Postcolonial Critique"

Hito Steyerl (May, 2002)

The debate on cultural globalization also often involves so-called postcolonial
theory. What does this encompass? According to Ruth Frankenbert and Lata Mani
(1993, 292), postcolonialism refers to a specific "conjuncture" of social force
fields and a type of political positioning in relation to local conditions.
Geopolitical power gradients strongly influence these social relations. They
influence the emergence of certain subjectivities -- and thus also the
production of art and the formation of the aesthetic and cognitive categories
of its perception. Since global power relations structure living conditions all
over the world today, according to Frankenberg and Mani's definition the place
where postcolonial power relations are in effect, is therefore equally
ubiquitous. This place is neither outside social practices nor beyond the
borders of western societies, but is rather reproduced within them as a social
relationship of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion.

"The Dialectic and 'The Party':

Lukács' History and Class Consciousness Reconsidered"

Peter Hudis

The startling discovery, made several years ago in an archive in Moscow, of a
heretofore unknown manuscript defending History and Class Consciousness by
its author, Georg Lukács, seemed destined to impel a reconsideration of one of
the most important chapters in the history of Marxism.
From the moment of its publication in 1923, History and Class Consciousness
was renowned for its creative attempt to restore the revolutionary nature of
Marx's thought through an extension and renovation of Hegel's dialectic. Neither
the Communist International's denunciation of the book in 1924, nor Lukács'
later "self-criticism" of it when he capitulated to Stalinism, lessened its
appeal for several generations of radicals drawn to its innovative discussion of
class consciousness, reification, and the dialectical interrelation between
subject and object. Nevertheless, Lukács' failure to speak out in defense of his
book following the attacks on it in 1924 led many to conclude that he
abandoned its perspective soon after its publication.

"Freezing the Movement:

Posthumous Notes on Nuclear War" (1983)

George Caffentzis

Preface (2003)

I found the following set of “posthumous notes” recently while I was cleaning up a closet. They were written, on the basis of memory and textual evidence, in the spring of 1983, right before I left the US to live and teach in Nigeria. Some of the material in these notes went into a couple of articles that were published then. One was in the "Posthumous Notes" (1983) issue of Midnight Notes and the other was in a piece entitled “The Marxist Theory of War” in the Radical Science Journal issue on the anti-nuclear war movement (1983). But they have since been unread and untroubled. My rediscovery of these notes puts them and me in a tight logical spot. I was supposed to have been dead (and reborn) according to these notes…but I clearly am neither. So their circulation now immediately falsifies them. Self-negating or not, I am hoping that these notes from the dead might be of use to the living at a time when nuclear war is again on the agenda. Anyway, please receive these notes as a gift on the Day of the Dead. -- November 2, 2003


A Lamentation

Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people and go from here! for they be all adulterers, and assembly of treacherous men. -- Jeremiah, Lamentations 9:2

"The existence of the bomb paralyzes us. Our only motion a gigantic leap backward in what we take to be the minimal conditions of our existence whereby all desires, demands, struggles vanish; only our biological existence appears a valid cause. Don't kill us, exterminate us, burn us alive, make us witness the more most horrid spectacle the mind can imagine (?????), lived thousands of times in our fears watching the 7:00 News, reading the "scientific medical reports." Please let us live, that's all we ask, forget what this life will be like, forget about our now seemingly utopian dreams..."


But isn't this declaring we're already dead? Isn't this admitting the explosion has already worked, that we've already been blown to pieces hundreds of times when, of all our needs and struggles, only the will to survive remains? Worse yet. Isn't this declaration a most dangerous path? For when only people on their knees confront the powers that be, these powers feel godlike and justified, not restrained by the fear that should they dare so much, whoever of us will be left will make life impossible for them as well.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Raoul Vaneigem, Refusals and Passions"

An Interview with Francois Bott

CONVERSATION: The author of Treatise on Living for the Young Generations pursues his quest for happiness.

Lovers of Existence. In The Knight, the Lady, the Devil and Death, Raoul Vaneigem takes stock in the manner of the navigators. These aren't his Memoirs. He's asking the time. What time is it in my own existence? "It is a time in which the years efface themselves," Vaneigem writes in the Preamble. "They abandon us all the more easily because we have refused to count them. They only leave us in a forest that is both strange and familiar, worrisome and peaceful. . .."

Born in 1934 in Lessines, Belgium, Raoul Vaneigem was, in his youth, one of the strollers of the big cities who plotted against the market society, and one of musketeers of the Situationist International, which spread the most subversive ideas. Published in 1967, his Treatise on Living for the Young Generations and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle inspired the May 1968 movement and revived revolutionary hopes among the even the least dreamy.

Thirty-five years have passed. Guy Debord committed suicide on 30 November 1994. Retired to the countryside, not too far from Brussels, Raoul Vaneigem has continued to write, complement his Treatise with such works as The Book of Pleasures, Address to the Living, Declaration of Human Rights, The Era of the Creators. . .. Rustic writer, writer of the dawn, the old musketeer has lost none of his critical verve with respect to a world subservient to the dictatorship of money. This great lover of existence, launched since his youth in search of happiness, despite bad weather and bad days, has kept his refusals and passions with us.

Question: In The Knight, the Lady, the Devil and Death (editions Cherche Midi), you speak of your own existence, which is a manner of asking for the time. What time is it? [translator: English in original] "Where are you in time?" wrote the boxer-poet Arthur Cravan. Perhaps at a certain moment of their lives the fashion in which the writers asked the time was definitive and different. . ..

hydrarchist writes:

"Crisis Theory in a Crisis Society"

Interview with Norbert Trenkle from the German group Krisis


Interviewers and translators: Timo Ahonen and Markus Termonen. Originally made for the Finnish Magazine Megafoni (http://megafoni.kulma.net).

How can the postindustrialized
situation be reacted to, which is represented as a phase of rupture, and in
which some present solutions solely inside the current model of wage work and
others support a fixed citizen’s income as the central form of social security?
In other words, how can the mechanisms disintegrating solidarity and the capitalist
relations of production be critized without stagnating into the defense of welfare
state or taking on the form of past industrial classes? These questions and
others are discussed in this interview with Norbert Trenkle from the German
Krisis-collective. The group, concentrating on theoretical productivity, aims
to criticize the capitalist society in a constitutive way by focusing on e.g.
work, capital and commodity production. As topics in this interview we also
have the current meaning of "leftism" and some questions concerning action methods.

First of all, could you
give a representation of the origins, stages, productions and efforts of your
group?

"Harass the Brass:

Some Notes Toward the Subversion of the US Armed Forces"

A friend who was in the U.S. military during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War told me that before President G.H.W. Bush visited the troops in Saudi Arabia, enlisted men and women who would be in Bush's immediate vicinity had their rifle and pistol ammunition taken away from them.  This was supposedly done to avoid "accidents."  But it was also clear to people on the scene that Bush and his corporate handlers were somewhat afraid of the enlisted people who Bush would soon be killing in his unsuccessful re-election campaign.

"The Olive-Drab Rebels:

Military Organizing During The Vietnam Era"

Matthew Rinaldi, Radical America Vol. 8 No. 3 1974

Introduction

"The morale, discipline, and battleworthiness of the U. S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious."

So wrote Col. Robert D. Heinl in June of 1971. In an article entitled "The Collapse of the Armed Forces", written for the eyes of the military leadership and published in the Armed Forces Journal, Heinl also stated, "Sedition, coupled with disaffection within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable, infests the Armed Services." This frank statement accurately reflects the tremendous upheaval which occurred among rank and file GIs during the era of the Vietnam war. Covered up whenever possible and frequently denied by the military brass, this upheaval was nevertheless a significant factor in the termination of the ground war, and helped to imbue a generation of working class youth with a deep-rooted contempt for America's authority structure.

Pages