Radical media, politics and culture.
September 19, 2002 - 11:33am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

New Statesman, September 16, 2002

The day when heaven was falling; Eric Hobsbawm saw the October revolution as the central reference point of the political universe. In this exclusive extract from his memoirs, he explains why, even when the crimes of Stalin were exposed, he could not bring himself to break with the Communist Party

Eric Hobsbawm

I am among the relatively few inhabitants of the world outside what used to be the USSR who have actually seen Stalin in the flesh. Admittedly, he was no longer alive but in a glass case in the great mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square: a small man who seemed even smaller than he actually was (about 5ft 3ins), by contrast with the awe-inspiring aura of autocratic power that surrounded him even in death. Unlike Lenin, who is still on view, Stalin was displayed only from his death in 1953 until 1961. When I saw him in December 1954, he still towered over his country and the world communist movement. As yet he had no effective successor, although Nikita Khrushchev, who inaugurated 'destalinisation' not many months later, was already occupying the post of general secretary and getting ready to elbow his rivals aside. However, we knew nothing of what was happening behind the scenes in Moscow.

September 18, 2002 - 2:30pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Ecology

hydrarchist writes: this is part II of the article. All of the notes are to be found at the foot of this page. Click here to return to the first part."

This kind of technology-led restructuring of production
conditions (including technique-led restructuring of the
conditions of supply of laborpower) may or may not be functional
for capital as a whole, individual capitals, in the short-or-
long-run. The results would depend on other crisis prevention
and resolution measures, their exact conjuncture, and the way in
which they articulate with the crisis of nature broadly defined.
In the last analysis, the results would depend on the degree of
unity and diversity in labor movements, environmental movements,
solidarity movements, etc. And this is a political, ideological,
and organizational question.

September 18, 2002 - 2:17pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Ecology

hydrarchist writes:
Because of its length, the following article has been divided into two parts. The second part can be found here. All foototes to the essay can be found at the end of the second installment. The work was initially published in 1988 in the founding issue of the innovative journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism. Other work produced by them can be found here.

"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism
A Theoretical Introduction*


By James O'Connor


"Those who insist that [environmental destruction] has
nothing to do with Marxism merely ensure that what they
choose to call Marxism will have nothing to do with what
happens in the world."-- Aiden Foster-Carter

Summary

This article expounds the traditional Marxist theory of the
contradiction between forces and relations of production, over-
production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of
crisis-induced restructuring of productive forces and production
relations into more transparently social, hence potentially
socialist, forms. This exposition provides a point of departure
for an "ecological Marxist" theory of the contradiction between
capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of
production, under-production of capital and economic crisis, and
the process of crisis-induced restructuring of production
conditions and the social relations thereof also into more
transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. In
short, there may be not one but two paths to socialism in
late capitalist society.

September 17, 2002 - 9:34am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

The Imperialist Backlash on Empire

Antonio Negri interviewed by Ida Dominijanni

Translated by Arianna Bove/ Erik Empson

Empire's commercial success indicates how the interpretative proposal of the
book resonates with the reality of the present. The proposal has become,
through agreement or disagreement, a compulsory point of reference in the
debate on the global world. S11 intercepts it, is interrogated by it and
interrogates it: especially the relationship between the form of Imperial
sovereignty outlined in the book and the actual American policy. The latter
seems to be characterised as a traditional imperialist state that aims to
redesign the geo-political borders of the planet by mobilising national
identities more than as global decentred and deteritorrialised Empire that
administers hybrid identities and flexible hierachies with no recourse to
ethnic, national traditions and values.

Q. Empire came out in the US at the beginning of 2000 and in Italy two years
later. In between the two towers collapsed. One would have expected the
Italian edition to have an additional chapter on S11 like many other
political books that came out this year. You didn't add one, is it because
the event was not epochal or because it did not constitute a surprise for
your thesis?

A. The event was very relevant but it confirmed one of the fundamental
theses of the book i.e. the end of American insularity and the difference
between telluric and maritime nations. The fact that New York could be
bombed like London, Berlin and Tokyo confirmed that the process of formation
of the new global order was fully deployed. The fact that Al Queda had
attacked the symbols of American economic power was a sign of the 'civil war' for imperial leadership. What is absolutely new with respect to the book's
structure is the fact that the American reaction is configuring itself as a
regressive backlash contrary to the imperial tendency. It is an imperialist
backlash within and against Empire that is linked to old structures of
power, old methods of command, and a monocratic and substantialist
conception of sovereignty that represents a counter tendency with respect to
the molecular and relational characters of the imperial bio-power that we
had analysed. The gravity of the situation today lies in this contradiction.

September 17, 2002 - 9:27am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
All Topics

Franco Barchiesi writes
"The following article was published (in Spanish) in “Brecha” (Montevideo, Uruguay), No. 876, 13 September 2002. The interview was done in Buenos Aires on 28 July 2002.

“South Africa: Popular Forms of Resistance”

Interview with Franco Barchiesi

by Veronica Gago and Diego Sztulwark

It is called operation “Khanyisa”, which means “switch-on” or “connect”. It is a mass practice that is implemented daily in South Africa and it consists of reconnecting basic services that have been suspended due to non payment. It is something not very different from what is going on in many neighbourhoods and communities of the Buenos Aires province. Attracted by this and other similarities, the Italian political analyst Franco Barchiesi -- lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg -- has come to Argentina. He is researching movements of resistance to privatisation in South Africa in relation with the unfulfilled promises of the government of Nelson Mandela and his successors, the first case, as he says, of “national liberation” to take place in times of globalisation. Barchiesi, 34, is one of the editors of the magazine “Debate – Voices from the South African Left”, was active in the Italian social centres and is currently taking part in various anti-neoliberal initiatives in South Africa.

September 16, 2002 - 4:46pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes"


On Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus


Antonio
Negri

Translated by Charles
T. Wolfe. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Chimeres 17 (Paris,
Fall 1992). It is printed in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Volume 18,
Number 2, 1995, in honor of the late Felix Guattari. Hacked from it is printed
form and publicized by korotonomedya in May 2002.


I


It is in Sein und Zeit
that Heidegger decrees the end of the Geisteswissenschaften and their
tradition (Enlightenment and Hegelianism), when, as he is commenting on the
Briefwechsel [exchange of letters] between Dilthey and Yorck von Wartenburg,
he pays homage to the latter for "his full understanding of the fundamental
character of history as virtuality [...] [which he] owes to his knowledge
of the character of being of human Dasein itself." Consequently, Heidegger
continues, "the interest of understanding historicality" is confronted
with the task of an elaboration of the "generic difference between the
ontic and the historical." But he must part ways with Yorck when the
latter, after having clearly established that difference, moves from virtuality
to mysticism.

September 16, 2002 - 2:00pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Finding the Strength to Love and Dream

By Robin D.G. Kelley, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2002

Like most of my comrades active in the early days of the Reagan era, I
turned to Marxism for the same reasons I looked to the third world. The
misery of the proletariat (lumpen and otherwise) proved less interesting
and less urgent than the promise of revolution. I was attracted to
"small-c" communism because, in theory, it sought to harness technology to
solve human needs, give us less work and more leisure, and free us all to
create, invent, explore, love, relax, and enjoy life without want of the
basic necessities of life.

I fell in love with the young Marx of The German Ideology and The Communist
Manifesto, the visionary Marx who predicted the abolition of all
exploitative institutions. I followed young Marx, via the late English
historian Edward P. Thompson, to those romantic renegade socialists, like
William Morris, who wanted to break with all vestiges of capitalist
production and rationalization. Morris was less concerned with socialist
efficiency than with transforming social relations and constructing new,
free, democratic communities built on, as Thompson put it, "the ethic of
cooperation, the energies of love."

September 13, 2002 - 12:25pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Bush and the Wall Street Journal"

Sean O'Torain

It is very difficult to have a proper view of the policies of the US
capitalist class without reading the Wall Street Journal. This publication is
aimed at the capitalists, not in a passive manner, but in order to stiffen
their backbone, to unify them behind specific objectives and to conduct a
struggle with them when they are missing what is in their own fundamental
interests. And to conduct a struggle with them when they are not ambitious
enough. Such as over the past years for example. Since the collapse of
stalinism the US is absolutely dominant militarily, econonically and
technologically on the world arena. The Wall Street Journal strategists have
a simple conclusion that they draw from this. Go out there and dominate. The
world is ours nobody can stand in our way. Go out there and take over and not
only that but deliberately do it openly to drive the lesson home to all. What
drove them wild about Clinton was that he was always consulting and dealing
and talking and trying to get agreement for US foreign policies.

September 13, 2002 - 10:56am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Work

saeedslama@hotmail.com writes:

From an Egyptian Website dedicated to Arabic texts in the social sciences
from the (communist) libertarian view. Egyptians writers and researchers,
participating in the libertarian radical left wing.

The Reality of the Egyptian Proletariat

By Sameh Saeed Abbood

Translation from Arabic

In the modern capitalist society, there are two concepts of the labor class.
The former expands to include all that are deprived of any control over
financial resources. Such concept also includes those who own nothing but
their mental and physical fore, which they are obliged to sell for, wages in
return.

September 9, 2002 - 12:37am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement

Billboard Liberation

Look up! Billboards have become as ubiquitous as human suffering, as
difficult to ignore as a beggar's outstretched fist. Every time you leave
your couch or cubicle, momentarily severing the electronic umbilicus, you
enter the realm of their impressions. Larger than life, subtle as war, they
assault your senses with a complex coda of commercial instructions, the
messenger RNA of capitalism. Every time you get in a car, or ride a bus, or
witness a sporting event, you receive their instructions. You can't run and
you can't hide, because your getaway route is lined to the horizon with
signs, and your hidey-hole has a panoramic view of an 8-sheet poster panel.

There are a million stories in the Big City, and as many reasons to want to
hack a billboard. We have our reasons, and we don't presume to judge yours.
In this manual, we have made a conscious effort to steer clear of ideology
and stick to methodology. The procedures outlined here are based on our 20
years' experience executing billboard improvements professionally, safely,
and (knock wood) without injury or arrest. In most cases, is should not be
necessary to follow the elaborate, even obsessive precautions we outline
here. A can of spray paint, a blithe spirit, and a balmy night are all your
really need.

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