Radical media, politics and culture.

saroj giri writes:

"Radical, Subversive Acts
Or, the Myth of Contingency, Freedom"

Saroj Giri

What makes individual cases of excess catapult from the particular to the universal? How is it that one particular event or person gets so highlighted at the expense of all other (counter-factual) particulars, so that the one universalised particular blocks our view of the rest? Isn’t this a prime ideological move in a commodity economy, under capitalism?


So often when we see someone achieving something under capitalism, when we find that somebody has made it big or has been successful in something we usually as a matter of habit perhaps associate it with the person’s individual abilities, luck, sense of enterprise, willingness to take risk etc.

This tendency to take up what is actually an effect of larger social relations to be just an individual thing is a widespread tendency under commodity fetishism. So we see only the individual and refuse to see the overall relations in which the individual exists. If the individual fails, that is due to the personal inability, bad luck etc of the person. If the person succeeds that is due to hard work and sense of enterprise etc of the individual. In either case, the individual is important, apparently.

"Unlikely Bedfellows" [Editor's Note: Oh Yeah?]

Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and higher education as a whole
have enjoyed a decidedly un-cozy relationship since the Vietnam War –
a fact that many in academe have found to be just fine with them,
thanks.


But if the FBI and higher education still aren't the best of friends,
they appear to be interacting a lot more. Reports this week about a
nationwide FBI outreach program in which agents set up meetings with
college leaders to discuss strategies for safeguarding academic
research from unfriendly foreign interests have fueled growing
concerns that the two entities are cozying up in uncomfortable ways
these days in the name of national security.


And yet the reports have also raised awareness of the agency's
potential value as a resource as colleges confront the vulnerability
inherent in an open system producing reams of research on topics
intimately tied to America's economic and physical security.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"On Lice and Fleas:
Observations Starting from the Conflict Between Iran and the USA"
Wayne Spencer

Translocales writes:

"On the Road to the US Social Forum:
Thinking from the Movements"
Translocal Productions: Sebastian Cobarrubias + Maribel Casas


With the USSF less than a month away, we thought now was a good time to let rip a couple of general reflections on our experiences in US social movements. Supposedly, despite the many and often justifiable critiques, the Social Forum processes are times to reflect on where we have been collectively as social movements, share tools and analyses, and start to beat paths into the uncertain future.

What follows then are a few things we noticed time and time again in US-based social movements but which we rarely hear discussed, other than as side comments among a few companions. While we have heard excellent critiques and ways to deal with things such as- privilege and supremacy issues within movements, exclusionary forms of activism, linking local community struggles to global questions (war, capitalism), what follows are a few things that we rarely see discussed but which we believe could be something useful for some organizations, collectives and activists to dig their teeth into.

V annon writes:

"World Options: Apocalypse or Resistance"
V Annon

Too bad there is no radical press in the West

nor even a free press .

If there were then you would not read this here.

There would be many articles like this
in your local newspaper, TV and national magazines…

Too bad no one really reads and so very few are radical
or else there would be a market for such articles…

Alas…

Colony Collapse: Do Massive Bee Die-Offs Mean an End to Our Food
System as We Know it?

Scott Thill, AlterNet

The joke may have fallen flat, but this time no one could blame Bill
Maher. Sure, it happened on the May 4, 2007 installment of his show
Real Time With Bill Maher, but CNN personality and senior medical
correspondent Sanjay Gupta was the one delivering the punch line, and
it seems he was the only one in the room who believed the issue of
Earth's mysteriously vanishing honeybees was a joke.

And while some
may argue that he stayed on message, promoting his May 19 documentary
called Danger: Poison Food, he nevertheless fumbled for answers when
Maher asked him about what could be killing a major component of the
nation's food supply.

"Fragments on Machinic Intellectuals"

Jack Bratich

[From the recently released book Constituent Imagination: Militant
Investigations // Collective Theorization,
edited by Stevphen
Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle, here.]

There is a common complaint leveled at intellectuals
today, lobbed from both Left and Right, which says intellectuals are
holed up in the ivory tower. They are accused of being either elitist
or reformist liberals, out-of-touch Marxists or armchair activists.
In each case intellectuals are assumed to be isolated from everyday
life. Over recent decades this charge has been thrown by the Left
against that all-purpose brand: theory. Charges of obscurantism,
jargonism, and armchair strategizing were leveled at
"posties" (postmodernists, poststructuralists, postcolonialists), yet
this specter of irrelevance obscures a larger trend taking place in
the U.S. academy: the growing corporatization of the university.[i]


According to Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias, in this
volume, the ivory tower itself has a mythic function, —erasing the
university's immersion in historical processes. The increasing
dependence of universities on corporate and federal funding has
created a set of interlocking institutions that, if anything, makes
intellectual work extremely relevant to and integrated with pragmatic
interests. Put simply, we are in an era of embedded intellectuals.[ii]
What can we make of this new condition?

Walter Rodney Lives!

Peoples Power No Dictator!

Wazir Mohamed

[A reflection on Walter Rodney’s continuing relevance 27 years after his assassination in Guyana on June 13, 1980, by the Wazir Mohamad, former Co-Leader of the Working Peoples’ Alliance of Guyana, now
PhD Candidate in Sociology-Binghamton University, New York.]

Part 1

The Stalled Rodney Inquiry and the Racial Dimension of Guyana

I think it necessary that this pertinent question is asked: What happened to Walter Rodney, why was he assassinated, and who was responsible? After years of stops, starts, and inaction on this issue, in 2005 it seemed as though an international inquiry into Rodney’s assassination was finally on the cards.

The Guyanese Parliament on June 29 2005 passed a unanimous resolution authorizing the creation of a commission of inquiry, whose terms of reference were to be ironed out among representatives of the Government, the Rodney family, and others. This year as we mark 27 years since his passing we ask, what has happened to this decision for the inquiry?


It is now 27 years since Walter Rodney “the prophet of self-emancipation” was murdered in a dark corner, at a dark moment of Guyana’s history. That day in June 1980 is arguably the saddest of modern Guyana. I was 22 years old at that time, but my life was already enmeshed in the struggle which Walter Rodney defined in terms of a battle for “peoples’ power – no dictator”. Dictatorial rule was the hallmark of the Burnham presidency which ruled Guyana for more than two decades. Yet, for many years until his death in 1985 Burnham was revered in the corridors of power in the region, in Cuba, the Soviet Union, and all the Eastern Bloc Countries.

Ben Trott writes:

"Moving against the G8"

Ben Trott, Red Pepper

[When the G8 travelling circus rolls up to Rostock in Germany later this month, it will again be met with mass protests. Ben Trott reports on the efforts of the German left to unite and draw lessons from the protests at the 2005 Gleneagles summit.]

The G8 last met in Germany in the summer of 1999, six months before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle, and well into the socalled ‘cycle of struggles’ that began with the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. Yet for Germany’s ‘globalisationcritical movement’, as it came to be known, the mobilisation against the Cologne G8 Summit was a false start.


The mobilisation was split in numerous directions. Confusion had been created by the role that the German Greens – and in particular Joschka Fischer, who was foreign secretary and their most senior member of parliament – were playing in steering Nato towards a military intervention in Kosovo.The radicals, meanwhile, were split into two different camps and unable to exert much influence within the broader coalition.The turnout on the streets was low, huge police repression was experienced and the protests were generally considered a disaster.The mobilisation around this year’s G8 summit, to be held in Heiligendamm near Rostock on 6-8 June, has sought to learn from this experience.

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