Radical media, politics and culture.
June 28, 2003 - 5:27pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Anarchism as Moral Theory:

Praxis, Property, and the Postmodern"

Randall Amster

Abstract

This essay explores the prospect of attaining a non-coercive morality that could enable the simultaneous realisation of maximal individual freedom and stable community, through the exposition of an anarchist theory premised on a subjective 'conscience-ethic', an inherent tendency toward sociality and 'mutual aid', and normative 'usufruct' in property. Part of the project entails the development of a reflexive synthesis between the two seemingly contradictory ends of 'individual' and 'community', concluding that only an anarchist 'social order' integrating self, society, and nature can resolve this apparent tension. In this regard, an argument is advanced here for a commonly-held materiality (deriving from the 'state of nature') that sets the framework for a normative view of property and possession. The essay concludes with an assessment of the efficacy of an accord between anarchist moral theory and poststructuralism.  

June 27, 2003 - 11:37am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"The Aesthetics of Empire and the Defeat of the Left"

Kees van der Pijl, International Relations and Politics, University of Sussex


The ‘War on Terrorism’ launched by the United States after the suicide attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September, 2001, builds on a longer history of international confrontation and pressure and more specifically, on a series of postures which have been adopted by the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These postures have included ethical foreign policy, humanitarian intervention, and peace enforcement. They are all part of the quest for a coherent, post-cold war global strategy on the part of the neo-liberal, Atlantic core of the international state system. As I have argued elsewhere (van der Pijl, 1998: ch. 3), capital has historically crystallised in an English-speaking ‘heartland’, from which it continues to radiate, overlaying the transnationalisation of capital from other centres such as East Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America. In this heartland, the capitalist class is most firmly rooted and it is from this core that it organises its transnational class alliances across the globe. Certainly in the recent period, fractures have appeared in the effort to multilateralise US global strategy by straight pressure and the ‘international community’ seems to have narrowed down again to the United States and Britain. But the basic premise that it is ‘ethical’ to wage war against sovereign peoples for their own good, or that whatever the cost to the civilian population, an embargo can be imposed on a nation for political reasons, remains widely accepted. The systemic requirement for a continued growth of capitalism and the deepening of its discipline over society and nature on a world scale, in the end ties the fate of the global capitalist class to the continued ability of the US-led ‘West’ to project its power world-wide.

June 27, 2003 - 9:46am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"On the Future of Radical Politics"

Saul Newman

In my undergraduate days at Sydney University, during
my brief flirtation with Trotskyism, I was always
struck by the sectarianism of its politics. The
Trotskyists, or the Socialist Workers Party as they
called themselves, consisted of all of about three
hardcore members (probably even fewer these days).
They routinely split, formed opposing factions and, in
the most vitriolic terms, accused each other of
revisionism, betraying the party line, perverting the
true message of Marxism, and other heinous offences.

June 27, 2003 - 9:41am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Rob submits:

"The Meaning of Rachel Corrie:

Of Dignity and Solidarity"

Edward Said, CounterPunch, June 26, 2003



In early May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter's murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter's body. They had immediately sought out their US Senators, Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn't materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family.

June 25, 2003 - 5:08pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"The Real Clash of Civilizations"

John Chuckman, June 24, 2003

There is a real clash of civilizations in the world, but one that has little to do with East and West. It is found in the advanced world and consists in the values of traditional liberalism being attacked by the right wing. Nowhere is this battle noisier and of more consequence to the world's peoples than in America where victory for the right appears all but certain.

June 25, 2003 - 5:04pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"The Fight for Che's Legacy"

Boris Kagarlitsky, Moscow Times, Tuesday, Jun. 17, 2003

On June 14, Ernesto "Che" Guevara would have turned 75. Much loved during his lifetime, "El Comandante" was even more revered after his tragic death in 1967. Che's execution at the age of 39 gave rise to a cult following in Western Europe and the Americas. The new left was sorely in need of a hero. The rebellious youth movement of the 1960s rejected traditional leadership icons, but its need for a heroic ideal was profound.

June 25, 2003 - 10:30am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"Theses on the Mass Worker and Social Capital"

Guido Baldi, Radical America (Vol. 6, No. 3, May-June 1972)

1

The years from the beginning of the century up to the English general strike of 1926 witness this crucial new feature in class struggle: Whereas deep contradictions between developed and backward areas characterize capitalism at this stage and confine it to national levels of organization, the political autonomy and independence of the working class reach an international level: For the first time, capital is bypassed by the workers at an international level. The first international cycle, roughly 1904 to 1906, is a cycle of mass strikes which at times develops into violent actions and insurrections. In Russia, it starts with the Putilov strike and develops into the 1905 revolution. 1904 is the date of the first Italian general strike. In Germany, the spontaneous Ruhr miners' strike of 1905 on the eight-hour issue and the Amburg general strike of 1906 lead a class wave that overflows into a large network of middle-sized firms. In the US, the miners' strikes of 1901 and 1904 and the foundation of the 1WW in 1905 seem to be a premonition of the struggles to come.

June 21, 2003 - 11:05am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade submits "Guy Debord / Attila Kotányi / Raoul Vaneigem

Theses on the Paris Commune



1

“The classical workers movement must be reexamined without any illusions,
particularly without any illusions regarding its various political and pseudotheoretical
heirs, for all they have inherited is its failure. The apparent successes of this movement
are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state
bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt) are its
most promising successes so far, for us and for the future.” (Internationale
Situationniste #7.)

June 21, 2003 - 11:02am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"Realer Than Real:

The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari"

Brian Massumi

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world,
Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of
postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent,
leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an
ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality
whatsoever. That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution
of signs of the real for the real. In hyperreality, signs no longer represent
or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer
only to other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the
phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions. But
postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them,
images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any
term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination. Faced with this
homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. We can only
gape in fascination. For the secret of the process is beyond our grasp.
Meaning has imploded. There is no longer any external model, but there is an
immanent one. To the syntagmatic surface of slippage there corresponds an
invisible paradigmatic dimension that creates those minimally differentiated
signs only in order for them to blur together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange
and circulation. Hidden in the images is a kind of genetic code responsible for
their generation. Meaning is out of reach and out of sight, but not be cause
it has receded into the distance. It is because the code has been miniaturized.
Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information
fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism. The generalized
digitality of the computerized society.

June 21, 2003 - 10:24am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"The California ideology"

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (August 1995)

"Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will." — Naum Gabo [1]

As the Dam Bursts...

At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications into hypermedia is finally happening. [2] Once again, capitalism's relentless drive to diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labour is on the verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, play and live together. By integrating different technologies around common protocols, something is being created which is more than the sum of its parts. When the ability to produce and receive unlimited amounts of information in any form is combined with the reach of the global telephone networks, existing forms of work and leisure can be fundamentally transformed. New industries will be born and current stock market favourites will swept away. At such moments of profound social change, anyone who can offer a simple explanation of what is happening will be listened to with great interest. At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age: the Californian Ideology.

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