Radical media, politics and culture.
January 14, 2002 - 5:39am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
The State

oingoz writes: "The institution of domestic police is a distraction meant to keep us further stuck than we already are, in my view.

Below are two proposals for dealing with the situation I will discuss, the second one quite long (originally published in "Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed" #43 in the letters section.



This rant/article is anti-copyright. Feel free to pass it around and publish it freely.



Cops are fooled pawns in a larger meta-game of virtual chess played by policymakers who aren't in their positions for no reason. Like almost everyone else, cops are often originally "sold" on the idea of "doing a service" to society. Basically, they are similar to military soldiers, in this regard: Going into the job with ideals in mind, shortly to learn, like in probably every other sector of government (or work in general for that matter), that ideals are mostly thrown out the window.


Cops are a kind of soldier. And they are often uncritical, authority-trusting *tools* used as a type of live bait for people who never get it that they should be engaging the REAL *enemy*--our collective bigoted and individual-reducing MINDSET which allows for such alienated institutions as cops in the first place.


At worst, we should seek to entirely AVOID interacting with professional domestic soldiers called cops. At best, we should be actively messing with the formal divisions which keep them and us alienated from them as individuals!


Me, I'd rather have no more to do with cops than I'm now forced. Still, I see the value of promoting interaction and community where informed interaction is the method of choice, instead of these big wastes of time in actually throwing our energy into engaging them in any formalized way (including at demos which turn ugly).


Two proposals:

A) A "food not bombs"-type freefoodforall, yet called "DOUGHNUTS FOR COPS". Give store-bought doughnuts to cops and freefoodforall to houseless/homeless, etc.


B) GOOD PEASANT, BAD PEASANT


Good Peasant, Bad Peasant: Some considerations about "traditional" anarchist tactics and some possible alternatives.


I'd like to respond to the view that seems to be quite uncritically prevalent in left and Anarchist circles these days: The idea that there can only be a limited view of what "militancy" means in order to be "successfully" "revolutionary". And, along with that, the idea of what kind of thinking and action constitutes "realistic" responses to official injustice.

January 13, 2002 - 1:05am -- nomadlab
Analysis & Polemic
News

YellowTimes.ORG writes: "
By Christopher Reilly

YellowTimes.ORG Journalist


(YellowTimes.ORG) – After the Houston-based energy company Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month, the company’s trail of corruption leads directly to the Bush administration’s backyard. The connections between members of the Bush administration and the corporate-giant are too large to ignore, making it hard to imagine that Bush administration members, including the president himself, had no involvement in illegal activity that has resulted in thousands of people losing their jobs, many of those losing their entire life savings.

January 13, 2002 - 1:01am -- nomadlab
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

hydrarchist writes: "

The Socialist Workers Party is the sister organization to Left Turn in the United States. Through their front organization 'Globalize resistance' (on which please see the essay 'Monopolise Resistance?'), they have endeavoured to assume the leading role in actions against the institutions of capiotalist globalization in Europe. As the SWP are a traditional trot outfit their demonstrations are neither colourful, imaginative or amusing and they happear to feel that they are losing ground. The following essay appeared in their journal in december, some months before Alex Callinicos produced a critique of Empire (Toni Negri in Perspective) which he claimed to be the intellectual basis behind the 'black block.' This was manifestly wrong, so now it appears that the SWP are knocking on the door of those who really do endorse the Empire agenda to a large degree, the White Overalls, and their leader Luca Casarini. Interested readers will find other articles on the subject in our archives which are easily and efficiently searchable.

Theories of Conflict


How does the anti-capitalist movement face up to the challenges of war and state repression? Luca Casarini and Alex Callinicos discuss the issues

January 11, 2002 - 5:53pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Brian Holmes writes:

The central idea of this piece — about the cooptation of formerly
subversive ideas by the networked managerial class — is hardly new: after
all, "The Californian Ideology," by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, was
written in 1995. But the absorption of counter-cultural practices in a
working neoliberal hegemony turns out to be not just a California product.
Nor do I think we can blame it all on the popularity of Deleuze and
Guattari. What I try to analyze here is the way a new culture-ideology was
forged in response to the response to the last great cycle of dissent in
the 60s-70s, how it came to center on the personal computer, and how it
fits into an integrated economic system, that of "flexible accumulation."
The demonstration takes the form of a dialectical reevaluation and
actualization of some of the central theses of the Frankfurt School. —
Brian Holmes

January 10, 2002 - 12:49am -- nomadlab
Analysis & Polemic
News

YellowTimes.ORG writes: "
By Sharif Nashashibi

Chairman of Arab Media Watch

www.arabmediawatch.com


(YellowTimes.ORG) – Two schools of thought emerged after the 1991 Gulf War regarding U.S. motives for ousting Iraqi troops from Kuwait. One accepted the official line: a straightforward, humanitarian desire to liberate an occupied country. The other believed the U.S. wanted political, economic and military dominance of the world’s most oil-rich region. By defeating Saddam Hussein, the US had neutralized a formidable power that may oppose this dominance, and ingratiated the Gulf kingdoms by removing a regional threat. This ensured oil access, political alliances, weapons sales and military bases in the Arabian Peninsula.

January 7, 2002 - 6:40pm -- nomadlab
Analysis & Polemic
News

Mitchel Cohen writes: "With the President of the United States about to revisit and complete the missions that his father left hanging, we will need more than an oedipal understanding of why the US military is about to be deployed in Somalia nine years after the first go-round, and possibly against Iraq as well.

Somalia, & the Cynical Manipulation of Hunger

by Mitchel Cohen

"To pull out of Somalia would be] devastating to our hopes for the New World Order ..." - General Colin Powell (now Secretary of State), September 1993

"To give food aid to a country just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason." - Henry Kissinger, 1974

Sept. 11th, 1990: President George Bush, Sr. announces his plan for a "New World Order," as U.S./U.N. troops begin amassing in Saudi Arabia shortly before launching the horrendous bombardment against Iraq. One of Bush’s last decisions before leaving office in the Winter of 1992-3 was a large military operation in Eastern Africa, posing as a massive "humanitarian effort" under the aegis of the United Nations as well as the United States to feed the allegedly starving Somali people.

January 7, 2002 - 5:26pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

From Jan. 31-Feb. 4, the World Economic Forum (WEF) will be meeting
at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan for it's annual summit. Alexander
Downer, who attended the 1998 Summit, describes the Summit as
the world's 'Business Olympics'. The yearly meeting, usually
held at WEF headquarters in Davos, Switzerland, was rescheduled
to meet in New York as a token of support for the injuries our
city sustained on September 11th.

The WEF is, in a way, a big cocktail party for the global corporate
elite. As an organization, it has no power to actually set policy,
but it creates a space in which international "leaders" can hash
out their vision for the rest of us. In their own words, "they
are fully engaged in the process of defining and advancing the
global agenda." More specifically, it's our globe, but it's their
agenda.

January 5, 2002 - 4:13pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Shall We Leave It to the Experts?

Arundhati Roy

India lives in several centuries at the same time.
Somehow we manage to progress and regress
simultaneously. As a nation we age by pushing outwards
from the middle - adding a few centuries on to either end
of our extraordinary CV. We greaten like the maturing
head of a hammer-headed shark with eyes looking in
diametrically opposite directions. On the one hand, we
hear that European countries are considering changing
their immigration laws in order to import Indian
software engineers. On the other, that a Naga sadhu at
the Kumbh Mela towed the district collector's car with
his penis while the officer sat in it solemnly with his
wife and children.

January 5, 2002 - 12:02am -- Uncle Fluffy
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes: "

This translation is the work of Ed Emery.

The following is a contribution by Toni Negri to a meeting in 2001 at
the
Literature Faculty of the La Sapienza university, organised by the
group
Laboratorio Sapienza Pirata. The Italian text was circulated on the
Multitudes-Infos discussion list. I have translated it in order to
bring it
to a wider audience.


Globalisation.... Multitude etc.


"I feel uncomfortable when people talk about the birth of the
globalised
world simply as a kind of effect, a given, an expansion of the empire
that
was left [after the disappearance of the USSR].


"Globalisation, which really begins to lift off in 1989, doesn't happen
simply by the outward spreading of one empire when another empire
disappears. It is born of far deeper roots. Globalisation is the point
of
confluence of working class and proletarian struggles which could no
longer
be regulated within the confines of the nation State. The dynamic which
consisted of struggles - creation of inflation - balancing of state
budgets - pressure on welfare - breaking of the material elements of
the
bourgeois constitution, led gradually to two things: first, a theory of
the
limits of democracy (and strangely here we find that same Huntington
who
wrote about the "clash" of civilisations in a document of the
Trilateral
Commission back in the 1970s), and then a powerful push towards going
beyond
the nation State.

January 3, 2002 - 1:39pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Mira Jovanovich writes:

"Yellow Overalls Must Rise! (in order to lay down again)

TFG Casper, former member of dissolved NYC Ya Basta! Collective


Part One.


By Mira Jovanovich


_____


MJ: I'm wondering if you can give us a little background on Ya Basta and the yellow overalls, as it has played out here in North America.

TFGC: The New York City Ya Basta! Collective formed just a few weeks after the pictures and stories from the protests in Prague [IMF meetings, Sept 2000] were transmitted across the Atlantic. Like many people inspired by these communications, we were interested in understanding the dynamics of this relatively new and somewhat poetic tactic of civil disobedience, and attempted, as far as possible, to gather intelligence on the efforts of the "tute bianche". We had the fortunate privilege of having an Italian activist as a member of our local collective, one who was more than familiar with the developments of the white overalls and the Ya Basta Association, specifically as things evolved in cities like Milan and Genoa. We received greatly informed reports as developments would happen.

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