Radical media, politics and culture.
March 28, 2003 - 11:17am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade writes:

This is no war, there is no enemy except singled out by the most powerful. It is pure destruction, simple: of the spirit, the psyche, the faith, of the belief in everything civilized. It is manifest barbarism. It is pure vulgarity, brutality. How would a british gentilman put it?

'Yes, it is very rude indeed.'

This is about libertinism and about pornography. 24 hours Arab porn live!

March 28, 2003 - 11:09am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Jett writes   This essay deals with an issue central to contemporary international relations: the on-going transformation of sovereignty.

Sovereignty is a kind of authority; traditionally it has been conceived of as the indivisible monopoly power over social, political, and economic matters within discrete geographically defined and contained units (i.e. sovereign States); for example, the authority of a government to tax economic activity or to assert laws within "its" territory. The modern system of dividing the earth into sovereign territorial States arose out of feudal European socio-political theory, with the Peace of Westphalia treaties (1648) as the "coming-out" moment in which these theories were first substantially established as "international law". The concept of sovereignty has since developed in time with Western thought, and this system of political organization has spread throughout the earth, primarily through the colonial endeavors of European empire-builders.

March 28, 2003 - 10:59am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Louis Lingg writes:
"I found the following timeline on the Practical History website.


Since the state of Iraq was created early this century, the working class in the area have suffered brutal exploitation and repression at the hands of the rival ruling class groups competing for power. As if dealing with these home grown gangsters wasn't enough, they have also faced the bullets and bombs of the global capitalist powers (especially Britain and America) seeking to control the oil wealth of this part of the world.


Meanwhile opposition political organisations such as the Iraqi Communist Party and the Kurdish Democratic Party have consistently made deals with both Iraqi regimes and the global powers at the expense of those who they claimed to be leading in resistance to the state. Despite all this, the working class has shown itself a force to be reckoned with, toppling governments and sabotaging war efforts. This brief chronology charts some of the key moments in a century of war and rebellion.

March 28, 2003 - 10:23am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

jim writes:

René Riesel: From Situationism to the Farmers' Confederation, a Radical Thinker


Submission is Advancing at a Frightful Speed

Alain Léauthier

Libération (3-4 February 2001)

Translated by Tom McDonough



STILL FIGHTING

FORMER MEMBER of the Situationist International, 51-year-old René Riesel breeds sheep on the Méjean plateau in Lozère. At the age of 17 he belonged the Nanterre ?Enragés,? then to the Occupation Committee at the Odéon in May ?68. The ?situs? would recognize him as one of their own, the youngest and also the most promising of them according to Guy Debord, before expelling him like almost all the others.


The very image of the urban rebel, Riesel became one of the gray eminences of the Farmers? Confederation. Then, at variance with them, he left it in 1999. He did not, however, give up fighting.

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March 27, 2003 - 9:05am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes: "This screed just in from the SWP UK Theory Commisar... pretend they are not there?"

"Autonomism: Evading Power"

Alex Callinicos


Counterposed to reformism within the anti-capitalist movement is a position that is apparently its opposite, renouncing not only a reliance on the existing state, but the very objective of taking power from capital. This is the position taken by the autonomist wing of the movement whose most famous representatives are the Italian disobbedienti. This takes its inspiration from some of the remarks of the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. For instance, he writes, 'Perhaps, for example, the new political morality will be constructed in a new space that will not require the taking or retention of power but the counterweight and opposition that requires and obliges the power to "rule by obeying".'

March 26, 2003 - 8:44pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Events

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The goal of Autonomous Action (AD) is to form a common libertarian communist organisation in the area of the former Soviet Union.


Autonomous Action was organised in its first general meeting in January

2002, until then it had existed two years as a project. Currently Autonomous

Action has local groups in dozen or so cities of Russia and Armenia, and

supporters in Belarus, Lithuania, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Read more about us from our website at www.avtonom.net.

A report from our February meeting follows below:

March 26, 2003 - 5:43pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

We recently received this manuscript with the note: 'Dear friends. I know that you will appreciate this text. I trust you to do what you see fit, please excuse my English, publish it warts and all as you say in your language...' It was sent from a still Muslim country, and it begins:

The challenge of our times -- for us proletarians who live in countries where Islam is part and parcel of the status quo --, is to criticize this "religion of the desert", not for God's sake but for our very own. So that we don't have to worry anymore about anyone coming back from the dead to tell us if there is life after death. It seems more human to find out whether there is life before death. (1)




"The Misery of Islam:

An Iranian Situationist Critique of Religion"

Al-Djouhall


"When I was lying in my warm, damp bed these questions did not interest me one jot and at such a time it did not matter to me whether God really existed or whether He was nothing but a personification of the mighty ones of this world, invented for the greater glory of spiritual values and the easier spoliation of the lower orders, the pattern of earthly things being transferred from the sky. All I wanted to know was whether or not I was going to live through to the morning. In face of death, I felt that religion, faith, belief were feeble, childish things of which the best that could be said was that they provided a kind of recreatian for healthy, successful people..." "The Blind Owl,"Sadegh Hedayat
March 26, 2003 - 4:00pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Anonymous Comrade writes: "This is a leaflet from an unnamed group I know nothing about, distributed in Glasgow at the end of the first Gulf War. Contact addresses for it are given at the end, but I have no idea if they're still valid."


"Ten Days that Shook Iraq:

Inside information From an Uprising"


The Gulf war was not ended by the military victory of America and the Allies. It was ended by the mass desertion of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. So overwhelming was the refusal to fight for the Iraqi state on the part of its conscripted army that, contrary to all predictions, not one Allied soldier was killed by hostile fire in the final ground offensive to recapture Kuwait. Indeed the sheer scale of this mutiny is perhaps unprecedented in modern military history.


But these mutinous troops did not simply flee back to Iraq. On their return many of them turned their guns against the Iraqi state, sparking a simultaneous uprising in both Southern Iraq and in Kurdistan to the North. Only the central region of Iraq surrounding Baghdad remained firmly in the state's hands in the weeks following the end of the war.


From the very start the Western media has grossly misrepresented these uprisings. The uprising in the South, centred on Basra, was portrayed as a Shia Muslim revolt. Whereas the insurrection in the North was reported as an exclusively Kurdish Nationalist uprising which demanded little more than an autonomous Kurdish region within Iraq.


The truth is that the uprisings in both the North and South of Iraq were proletarian insurrections.

March 26, 2003 - 11:51am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
News

Anonymous Comrade writes "Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2003



America: an Empire in Denial

By NIALL FERGUSON



Once there was an empire that governed roughly a quarter of the world's population, covered about the same proportion of the Earth's land surface, and dominated nearly all its oceans. The British empire was the biggest empire ever, bar none. How an archipelago of rainy islands off the northwest coast of Europe came to rule the world is one of the fundamental questions not just of British but of world history.

March 24, 2003 - 4:54pm -- nomadlab
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

hydrarchist writes:

The Media Companies' FCC Wishlist


By Jeffrey Chester, Center for Digital Democracy

March 18, 2003

With war looming on the horizon, the U.S. news media are already moving to wall-to-wall coverage of the conflict. But even as the outlets report on the war, their corporate bosses are seeking political favors from the Bush administration ? and the media executives know it.

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