Radical media, politics and culture.

At The Borders Of Europe

Etienne Balibar

[Lecture delivered October 4, 1999, on the invitation of the Institut francais de Thessalonique and the Department of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloni­ki. French text first published in Transeuropennes 17 (1999–2000): 9-17. This translation of this essay, by Erin M. Williams, originally appeared under the title "World Borders, Political Borders," in PMLA 117 (2002): 71–78.]

I am speaking of the "Borders of Europe" in Greece, one of the "peripheral" countries of Europe in its traditional configuration — a configuration that reflects powerful myths and a long-lived series of historical events. Thessaloni­ki is itself at the edge of this border country, one of those places where the dialectic between confrontation with the foreigner (transformed into a hereditary enemy) and communication between civilizations (without which humanity cannot progress) is periodically played out. I thus find myself, it seems, right in the middle of my object of study, with all the resultant difficulties.


The term border is extremely rich in significations. One of my hypotheses is that it is undergoing a profound change in meaning. The borders of new sociopolitical entities, in which an attempt is being made to preserve all the functions of the sovereignty of the state, are no longer entirely situated at the outer limit of territories; they are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever the movement of information, people, and things is happening and is controlled — for example, in cosmopolitan cities. But it is also one of my hypotheses that the zones called peripheral, where secular and religious cultures confront one another, where differences in economic prosperity become more pronounced and strained, constitute the melting pot for the formation of a people (demos), without which there is no citizenship (politeia) in the sense that this term has acquired since antiquity in the democratic tradition.

flint writes:

"Where License Reigns With All Impunity"

An Anarchist Study of the Rotinonshón:ni Polity

Stephen Arthur

The traditional society of the Rotinonshón:ni (Iroquois), "The People of the Longhouse," was a densely settled, matrilineal, communal, and extensively horticultural society. The Rotinonshón:ni formed a confederacy of five nations. Generations before historical contact with Europeans, these nations united through the Kaianere'kó:wa into the same polity and ended blood feuding without economic exploitation, stratification, or the formation of a centralized state.


"Their Policy in this is very wise, and has nothing Barbarous in it. For, since their preservation depends upon their union, and since it is hardly possible that among peoples where license reigns with all impunity — and, above all, among young people — there should not happen some event capable of causing a rupture, and disuniting their minds, — for these reasons, they hold every year a general assembly in Onnontaé. There all the Deputies from the different Nations are present, to make their complaints and receive the necessary satisfaction in mutual gifts, — by means of which they maintain a good understanding with one another." — François le Mercier, 1668 (1)


Some historical materialists claim a densely settled, agricultural population will inevitably develop into a hierarchically stratified society, with a centralized state and an exploitative economic redistribution system, in order avoid warfare while resolving blood feuds among its members.(2) While this is a common occurence, it is not the only way these issues have been resolved. Located along the southern banks of Kaniatarí:io (Lake Ontario), the traditional society of the Rotinonshón:ni (Iroquois),(3) "The People of the Longhouse," was a densely settled, matrilineal, communal, and extensively horticultural society. The Rotinonshón:ni formed a confederacy initially of five nations: Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk), Oneniote'á:ka (Onedia), Ononta'kehá:ka (Onondaga), Kaion'kehá:ka (Cayuga) and Shotinontowane'á:ka (Seneca). Generations before historical contact with Europeans,(4) these nations united through the Kaianere'kó:wa (“the Great Good Way”) into the same polity(5) and ended blood feuding without economic exploitation, stratification, or the formation of a centralized state.

Peter Waterman writes:

Labour After the World Social Forum, Nairobi, January 20-25, 2007
Can the Unions Become Again a Sword of Justice?
Peter Waterman

"It seems clear that in many countries, unions have lately come to be widely perceived as conservative institutions, primarily concerned to defend the relative advantages of a minority of the working population. One of the challenges which confront trade unionism in the twenty-first century is therefore to revive, and to redefine, the role as sword of justice." — Richard Hyman, UK (1999)

"Transformative politics needs to be firmly anchored in ethics. We need to rethink our strategy, our structures of organisation, our goals… everything, in relation to a radical ethics of equality. This means an ethics of care for the other. This is important because so much left politics has traditionally rejected the relevance of ethics. In the past, dominant traditions of left politics were more about organising and struggling for the sake of a Truth, than for the sake of myself and my equals. Left politics was – and still often is – more inclined to be faithful to an Idea (or to a programme or party) than to the people around us…For obvious reasons, this faithfulness to ideas and not to other people creates serious problems when it comes to co-operation for shared political goals." — Ezequiel Adamovsky, Argentina (2007)

"Reality is for people who lack imagination." — http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/2052/grafitti.h tml

Abstract:

The increasing participation of the ‘old, institutionalised, inter/national trade union organisations’ within the ‘new, networked, World Social Forum’ raises problems for the latter as well as the former. This report and reflection on the Nairobi WSF, January 2007, argues the existence two trends in labour’s participation. The major and dominant one comes from the traditional international unions, promoting ‘Decent Work’. The other comes from new unions, base organisations, labour networks, or other left bodies, for which the name proposed is the ‘Emancipation of Labour’. It is not difficult to trace the dependence of Decent Work on the hegemonic International Labour Organisation, on 20thC West-European notions of social (i.e. capitalist) partnership, on Keynesianism and collective-bargaining unionism. But the relationship of the Emancipation of Labour concept to a few recent, marginal and minor projects at Nairobi remains speculative. It is proposed that any EofL project would need to advance not simply new policies and a networked form but a new ethic. Whilst considering such elements to be present within the WSF, it is argued that these and other necessary elements are here only ambiguously present. There is also a certain complicity between the traditional unions, mediating between workers and inter/national hegemons, and a WSF dominated by non-government organisations (NGOs) of a mixed and often ambiguous nature. Whilst placing hopes on the WSF and on the emerging labour projects, the paper ends with reference to a Global Labour Charter Movement of a radically-democratic and utopian nature.

Venezuela's Oldest Private TV Network Played Major Role in Failed
2002 Coup

Bart Jones, Los Angeles Times

BART JONES spent eight years in Venezuela, mainly as a foreign
correspondent for the Associated Press, and is the author of the
forthcoming book Hugo! The Hugo Chavez Story.

May 30, 2007

VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez's refusal to renew the license of
Radio Caracas Television might seem to justify fears that Chavez is
crushing free speech and eliminating any voices critical of him.


Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect
Journalists and members of the European Parliament, the U.S. Senate
and even Chile's Congress have denounced the closure of RCTV,
Venezuela's oldest private television network. Chavez's detractors
got more ammunition Tuesday when the president included another
opposition network, Globovision, among the "enemies of the homeland."


But the case of RCTV — like most things involving Chavez — has been
caught up in a web of misinformation. While one side of the story is
getting headlines around the world, the other is barely heard.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Gasping From Out the Shallows:
Reflections on Revolution in the Early Twenty-First Century
Wayne Spencer

"Human beings are not fully conscious of their real lives. Groping in the dark, overwhelmed by the consequences of their acts, at every moment groups and individuals find themselves faced with outcomes they had not intended […] What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. We are engulfed. Separated from each other. The years pass and we haven’t changed anything." — Guy Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, 1959

"We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations, into the network of possible itineraries. We get used to it, it seems." — Guy Debord, "Critique of Separation," 1961

"If it seems somewhat absurd to talk of revolution, this is obviously because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive social transformation are concentrated. But all the alternatives are even more absurd, since they imply accepting the existing order in one way or another." — Internationale Situationniste #6, 1961

"Many people are sceptical about the possibility of a new revolutionary movement, continually repeating that the proletariat has been integrated or that the workers are now satisfied, etc. This means one of two things: either they are declaring themselves satisfied (in which case we will fight them without any equivocation); or they are identifying themselves with some category separate from the workers, such as artists (in which case we will fight this illusion by showing them that the new proletariat is tending to encompass virtually everybody)." — Internationale Situationniste #7, 1962

"The worst of misery
Is when a nature framed for noblest things
Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life
Gasping from out the shallows." — George Eliot, "The Spanish Gypsy," 1868

INTRODUCTION

1

“In the context of the reality presently beginning to take shape, we may consider as proletarians all people who have no possibility of altering the social space-time that the society allots to them (regardless of variations in their degree of affluence or chances for promotion)” (Situationist International, Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of Nature, Internationale Situationniste #8, 1963)

2

The first movement of the revolutionary proletariat against the alienation of capitalism, a movement exemplified by the great waves of workers’ struggles and revolutions that convulsed the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was destroyed by the machinations, mystifications and munitions of social democracy, fascism and Bolshevism.

With the defeat in the mid-1930s of the attempts by the revolutionary workers and peasants of Spain to establish a self-managed society, the century chimed midnight. In the course of the 1950s, a second movement of proletarian contestation began to grow restless under the new conditions of alienation erected out of the partial successes and ultimate failure of the earlier expressions of proletarian dissatisfaction. This contestation affected both poles of the apparently divided but actually united system of global capitalism: the state capitalism of the societies expropriated by Bolshevism and the affluent consumer capitalism of the West.

In the Soviet bloc, the uprisings in East Berlin in 1953, Poznań in Poland in 1956 and across Hungary in 1956, along with innumerable other acts of defiance both large and small, expressed the proletariat’s rejection of the pseudo-communist bureaucracies that reigned in the proletariat’s name yet subjected every aspect of society to an authoritarian domination for its own interests as a ruling class. In the West, wildcat strikes defied the unions, and sabotage, absenteeism, shoddy work and an avowed contempt for work revealed that sections of the proletariat were dissatisfied with the well-paid alienated labour on which the post-war consumer societies were based; so too there was a more sporadic and confused refusal of the machinery of permitted consumption.

In May 1968 in France and during the 1969 ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy, proletarian discontent coalesced into vast movements and refused quietly to subside afterwards; so much so that these two countries were singled out as objects of particular horror by an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development meeting of employment experts convened in 1971 out of fearful apprehension that “the industrial countries…are undergoing a revolution” whose first principle is the “challenge to authority”. According to this collection of specialists in workers submission, the perspective of a society “without classes, hierarchy, authority and regulations” was abroad in “industrial France”, while in Italy “the effects of industrial conflicts and social malaise are constantly combined” and “minor details of technical progress in workplaces…provoke conflicts whose violence is out of all proportion to their causes”.

They were right to be alarmed. In their study of 123 industrial conflicts in France in 1971, for example, Claude Durand and Pierre Dubois found that “significant illegalities”, such as occupations of premises or physical violence against employers, cadres, supervisors or police, had occurred in half of all disputes. And high levels of conflict persisted in many other regions of the advanced capitalist societies. However, by the end of the following decade, the second upsurge of the proletariat had been defeated. The state capitalist societies of Eastern Europe had all been overthrown, but they have been succeeded not by the management by proletarians themselves of all aspects of their individual and collective lives, but rather by the forms of representative democracy, alienated production and commodified everyday life characteristic of western liberal capitalism. In the west itself, the society of the abundant commodity continued to dominate every aspect of social life.

Mathew Toll writes:

"Marx's Grand Narrative:
The Materialist Conception of History"

Matthew Toll


The materialist conception of history was formulated by Marx in reaction to the major philosophies within Germany during the 1800s. Hegel, an influential theorist at the time, advocated absolute idealism, considering history as the unfolding of God’s plan. Marx aimed to give history an objective basis within the material conditions of human life in order to explain social movements. His conception of history, while highly influential, is not without contenders who criticise its ability to account for social change. This paper will give account of Marx’s materialist conception of history in its theoretical outline. The conception will then be illuminated in relation to historical examples of social change and tested in its ability explain these movements, in contention with another conception of history.

The foundation stone for the materialist conception of history was the existence of individual human-beings and their subsequent reproduction (Marx, 1969, pp.419-420). Marx considered the distinguishing feature between humans and animals was the formers ability to produce their own “means of subsistence” i.e. food, through their social organisation (Marx, 1969, p.409). Human-beings as social-beings organise along relations of production for mutual benefit or in the case of a slave because the threat of force coerces their natural volition (Marx, 1969, pp.419-420). Economic systems restrained by scarcity necessarily lead to conflict in the relationships between individuals in the economic sphere for scarce resources. Development of these relations of production leads to the organisation of societies into class systems, whereby individuals which have a particular relation to the means of production form a class (Marx, 1996, p.160).

Introduction to Civil War [fragments]

TIQQUN

From SOFT TARGETS


1. The elementary human unity is not the body—the individual—but the form-of-life.

2. The form-of-life is not beyond bare life, it is its intimate polarization.

3. Each body is affected by its form-of-life as if by a clinamen, a penchant, a leaning, an attraction, a taste. What a body leans toward also leans toward it. This goes for each and every situation. All inclinations are reciprocal.

4. This taste, this clinamen, can either be conjured away or assumed. To assume a form-of-life is not simply to recognize such a penchant, but to think it. I call thought that which converts a form-of-life into a force, into a sensible effectivity.

        In every situation there is one line that stands out among all the others, the line along which power grows. Thought is the capacity for singling out this line, and following it. That a form-of-life can only be assumed by following this line means: all thought is strategic.

Against and Beyond the State: An Interview with John Holloway

From ZMag


John Holloway and Marina Sitrin discussed the new social movements in Latin America, power, the state, and prefigurative politics, in February of 2007. This is a continuation of a discussion that began in 2004, also on the topics of power, prefigurative politics and Latin America.

MS: Our last interview/conversation was in 2004. In that we focused a great deal on the question of state power, and on not taking it in particular. We grounded most of the conversation in the autonomous social creations that have been and are taking place in Latin America. Today, in February of 2007, many people argue that much has since changed in Latin America . I am thinking in particular about the 7 "left" governments now in formal positions of power, from Bolivia and Venezuela to Ecuador and Nicaragua, and the people who say that "now" the left has arrived. Has there really been the shift that people are talking about? Is the important shift in formal power, as most commentators address? Should this even be the starting point of our conversation?

JH: Yes, I think it is a good place to start. These are not miserable times. Perhaps that is the most important point. Friends write to me from Europe sometimes and it is clear that they are thinking in terms of Johannes Agnoli’s argument, that it is important to keep subversive thought alive especially in miserable times such as the present. But, living in Latin America, it is very clear that these are not miserable times. They may be awful times, frightening times (especially in Mexico at the moment), but they are not miserable: they are exciting times, full of struggle and full of hope. The importance of the rise of the “left” governments is that they are a reflection of the strength of struggle in the continent as a whole, and that is very important.

I say “reflection”, but they are also a response to the rise of social struggles, a very complex and contradictory response. In all cases, they represent the attempt to statisfy the struggle, to give it a state form, which means of course to de-fuse the struggle and channel it into forms of organisation compatible with the reproduction of capital. In some cases the “left” governments are openly reformist and repressive (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay), in other cases (Venezuela, in particular), there seems to be a genuine attempt to push the state form to the limit, to open it out into real forms of popular control. How far that can be done from within state structures and from within a leader-dominated organisation I doubt very much, but certainly the trajectory of the Venezuelan government has been much more interesting than what one would have expected.

So the real importance of the “left” governments is NOT the façade but that behind the façade the continent is fizzing.

CAFA and the “Edu-Factory”

Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis

For about twenty years our relation to the edu-factory has been shaped primarily by the experience we made first as teachers in African universities (George at the University of Calabar from 1983 through 1987, Silvia at the University of Port Harcourt from 1984 through 1986) and later as members of CAFA (Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa), an organization we helped to found after returning to the U.S.

Teaching in Nigeria was a life-changing experience at many levels. These were years in which the country’s social and political life was undergoing a historic change, under the impact of the “debt crisis,” of prolonged negotiations with the IMF and, along with them, the introduction of the first austerity plans. The universities were at the center of this process and the resistance to it, both because of the intense debate and anti-IMF mobilization they generated and because, from an early start, they were one of the main targets of the cuts in public funds that were introduced in the name of paying the debt.


Already by 1984, on many campuses, student protests --against the cuts of student allowances and the repression of student activism--were the order of the day. By 1986, when the government implemented the first structural adjustment program (publicized however as a “homegrown” measure), the confrontation between students and government had become open and the student movement was more and more repressed by force. At least 30 students were massacred on May 5, 1986 in response to a peaceful demonstration on the campus of Ahmadu Bello University (Zaria). By the time we left Nigeria, the universities, when not shut down, were battlefields, as the students, soon in collaboration with teachers’ unions, became one of the main opposition forces to structural adjustment and the dismantling of public education demanded by the World Bank.


Having seen our students beaten, tear-gassed, expelled, it was inevitable that on returning to the US we would organize around education in Africa. We founded CAFA, in 1991, together with other colleagues, who, like us, had left the country because they found it difficult to continue to work there under the new SAP regime. Our objective was both to mobilize students and teachers in North America in support of the student/teachers struggles on the African campuses, and to denounce the World Bank’s program for education in Africa. It was clear, in fact, that the attack on the schooling system carried out through World Bank-designed SAPs, was part of a broader attack on African workers, and what many in Africa defined as a re-colonization project.

Acrostic Thespian writes:


Anarchist Poetics

Roger Farr, Fifth Estate #373 (Fall 2006)


[This essay was composed initially as a talk for the panel “From Anarchism to Activism,” held at the Vancouver Public Library on June 10th, 2005. It has since been revised. Thanks to my co-panelists – Robert Graham, Ron Sakolsky & Bob Sardis.]

“[The poet never] voices received opinions, or gives clear expression to the confused feelings of ‘the masses’: that is the function of the politician, the journalist, the demagogue.”
– Herbert Read, “Art and Alienation”

“Poetry is the end(s) of politics.”
– L. Mirari, “The Politics of Refusal vs. the Refusal of Politics”

Poetic Acts


How does poetics inform anarchism? And how does anarchism inform poetics? “Poetics,” from the Greek verb poieo (“I create”), means “way of creating”; thus, “anarchist poetics,” or anarcho-poiesis, is a way of creating anarchy, a way for anarchists to “reconcile utopian ideals with practical realities,” as the announcement for this event describes the problem. Particularly in the 20th century, certain strains of poetics have informed, or were informed by, the anarchist movement. This exchange continues today.


Some would push the link between poetics and anarchism – the collective struggle for individual emancipation – further. In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem writes: “Poetry is an act which engenders new realities: it is the fulfillment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence.” In a similar vein, in “On Poetic Living,” Wolfi Landstreicher insists that poiesis be understood as a creative act—and not merely as a literary artefact: “When I speak of poetry, I am not talking about versifying or wordsmithing. I am speaking about creating lives of passion, intensity and wonder.” But before we turn to the question how anarcho-poiesis might inform various anarchist projects, I want to offer some historical context to this overlooked element of anarchist thought.

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