Radical media, politics and culture.

Revelation Vertigo

Haduhi Szukis, Fifth Estate

"Autonomy is both the goal sought after and that whose presence–virtual–let us say, has to be supposed at the outset of an analysis or a political movement. This virtual presence is the will to autonomy, the will to be free." – Cornelius Castoriadis

There exists a tendency, shared across different strains of radical political thought, to see the horrors of our present as comprising a false totality, that when torn asunder, will reveal a more liberatory existence hidden beneath. This is to understand revolution as revelation; as the dispelling of the conditions of false consciousness, and a reclamation of an autonomous existence that continues to live on, albeit deformed, within this world we must we leave behind.

For the autonomist, this comes in the form of the working class for itself whose existence was disrupted, not destroyed, by the violent upheavals that formed the economic basis of capitalism (a process which Marx observes plays the same role in political economy that “original sin” does in theology). In primitivist thought, this becomes a reclaiming of a mythical ancestral past crushed, but never fully destroyed, by the weight of technological development and the machinations of alienation.

As powerful as such lines of argument can be, one danger in the politics of revelation is that every act of revealing not only illuminates the existence of certain processes and phenomena, but also effectively conceals others that do not fit within the structure of the revelation. It is when revelations become dogmatic, when they become “churchly” one might say, that they blind the true believer to all that falls outside the blinkers they have placed on their intellectual vision.

To question the process of questioning is to return to the etymological root of the concept of revolt, one based on a process of returning, discovering, uncovering, and renovating; one that is a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, of change, an endless probing of appearances. For it must be remembered that every act of revelation is not simply a discovery of what is, but also a construction of that which is, through a process of shared perception and understanding. Thus, to speak of an autonomous self-determining capacity that existed before the advent of capitalism providing the seeds and routes going through and beyond it, is not simply to uncover its existence, but also to take part in its collective construction. It is the presupposition of this autonomy, based on a perhaps mystical foundation, which enables the struggle for its realization.

Leaving this Stage of History

Ramor Ryan

1. The Quiet Apocalypse of Rising Tides

Climate change is everywhere. A momentous report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms that climate change is 'man-made and unstoppable'. The 21-page report, described as conservative by the IPCC itself, says human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are to blame for heat waves, floods and heavy rains, droughts and stronger storms, melting ice-caps and rising sea-levels.

The IPCC is comprised of over 2000 climate experts and scientists. It was set up in 1988 by the UN and the World Meteorological organisation to guide policy makers on the impact of climate change. Despite strenuous attempts by oil companies and big business to undermine the final report, it remains quietly apocalyptic in its assessment.

Its mind-boggling conclusion predicts serious water shortage for between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people, food shortages for 200 to 600 million people. Coastal flooding will hit seven million people within 70 years. The list of potential catastrophe goes on and on.

Politicizing Sadness

Colectivo Situaciones

More than five years after the insurrection of that Argentine December
of 2001 we bear witness to the changing interpretations and moods around
that event. For many of us sadness was the feeling that accompanied a
phase of this winding becoming. This text rescues a moment in the
elaboration of "that sadness" in order to go beyond the notions of
"victory and defeat" that belong to that earlier cycle of politicization
which centered on taking state power, and, at the same time, in order to
share a procedure that has allowed us to "make public" an intimate
feeling of people and groups.

Sadness arrived after the event: the political fiesta — of languages,
images, and movements — was followed by a reactive, dispersive dynamic.
And, along with it, there arrived what was later experienced as a
reduction of the capacities of openness and innovation that the event
brought into play. The experience of social invention (which always also
implies the invention of time) was followed by a moment of normalization
and the declaration of "end of the fiesta." According to Spinoza,
sadness consists in being separated from our powers (potencias). Among
us political sadness often took the form of impotence and melancholy in
the face of the growing distance between that social experiment and the
political imagination capable of carrying it out.

A vote for anarchy

Julian Baggini


The political philosopher Jacques Rancière would like to encourage the disruption of the normal order that is real democracy. Julian Baggini hears his campaign

If you rage against the growth of consumerist individualism, the dumbing down of education in the name of widening participation or the shallow hedonism of modern life, you're probably just expressing a deep-rooted hatred of democracy. That's the provocative thesis of Jacques Rancière, one of France's leading political philosophers, who challenges head on the tendency of leftist intellectuals to combine a professed concern for the masses with a haughty dismissal of virtually everything the masses actually think or do.

You'd be in good company, though. Rancière claims that hatred of democracy - a phrase he uses as the title of his latest book - is as old as politics itself. "I got my idea of democracy from Plato, from the greatest critic of democracy," he says in his staccato, effervescent English. "Plato would say democracy is the drawing of lots, the government of chance."

But what Plato saw as the horror of democracy was really its great virtue. Democracy is, says Rancière, the denial that there is any natural social order or hierarchy that determines who should rule over whom. In this way, it is close to anarchy.

A Video Interview with Peter Linebaugh

Counterviews


The short Counterviews video interview, "A Walk with Peter Linebaugh," by Tao Ruspoli, may be accessed here.

Ungdomshuset and the Copenhagen Youth Rebellion

Nikolaj Heltoft


From workers stronghold to social center, placed in the neighbourhood of Nrrebro historic, Ungdomshuset has been the epicentre of political contestation and social protest in Copenhagen. Today the
Youth House is no longer. It was first evicted the torn down. The kids
and their supporters hit the streets.

History crashing down

The house from 1897 which stood in the centre of the conflict,
originally named Folkets Hus (the People's House), was the result of
the early workers movements. In 1910, The Second International and
the German Socialist Clara Zetkin declared March 8 an International
Women's Day of Struggle from the house. Vladimir Lenin and Rosa
Luxemburg spoke there and in 1918 the great demonstration against
unemployment when workers stormed the Danish Stock Exchange started in
the house. After the war, the house gave shelter to German refuges for
a while, but as the Socialist movement's social texture in Copenhagen
changed, the house was abandoned in the 60's and stayed that way until
a group of young squatters from Nrrebro decided to squat the empty
building as a part of their year long campaign for a self managed
youth house in Copenhagen. In 1982, the mayor of Copenhagen Egon
Weidekamp gave the house for the young use and the house was named
Ungdomshuset (the youth house). "They get a house, and we get some
peace", the mayor said before handing over the keys. Those words were
to become very significant 25 years later.

Torrents of Desire and the Shape of the Information Landscape

Felix Stalder

We are in the midst an uneven shift from an information environment
characterized by scarcity of cultural goods to one characterized
by their abundance. Until very recently, even privileged people
had access to a relatively limited number of news sources, books,
audio recordings, films and other forms of informational goods. This
was partly due to the fact that the means of mass communication
were expensive, cumbersome and thus relatively centralized. In
this configuration, most people were relegated to the role of
consumers, or, if they lacked purchasing power, not even that.

This
is changing. The Internet is giving ever greater numbers of people
access to efficient means of mass communication and p2p protocols
such as Bittorrent are making the distribution of material highly
efficient. For some reason to be further examined, more and more
material is becoming freely available within this new information
environment. As an effect, the current structure of the culture
industries, in Adorno's sense,[1] is being undermined, and with it,
deeply-entrenched notions of intellectual property. This is happening
despite well-orchestrated campaigns by major industries to prevent
this shift. The campaigns include measures raging from the seemingly
endless expansion of intellectual property regulations across the
globe, to new technologies aimed at maintaining informational scarcity
(digital rights management (DRM) systems), to mass persecution of
average citizens who engage in standard practices on p2p networks.


As a consequence, we are in the midst of a pitched battle. One side we
have organized industries, with their well-honed machines of political
lobbying and armies of highly-paid lawyers and technologists, on the
other side. Strangely enough, on the other side, we do not have any
powerful interests or well-organized commercial players. Rather we
have a rag-tag group of people and small groups, including programmers
who develop open source tools to efficiently distribute digital
files; administrators running infrastructural nodes for p2p networks
out of their small ISPs (Internet Service Providers) or using cheap
hosted locations; shadowy, closed "release groups" who specialize in
circumventing any kind of copy-protection and making works available
within their own circles often before it they are available to the
public; and, finally, millions of ordinary computer users who prefer
to get their goods from the p2p networks where they are freely
available (not just free of charge, but also without DRM) and where
they can, if they wish to, release their own material just as easily.

Philip DePaolo writes:

"Terminal Marketing" in Real Estate

Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Philip DePaolo


Today’s article in the The Real Deal really got me going. Let’s review the facts...

An ad on craigslist.com in March 2006 for the Greenpoint Terminal Market showed the property on the market at $481 million.

The ad stated, “Land, Land and More Land, On The Waterfront, 852,160 SF, 10 Lots, $481,000,000 ... Investors, Developers ... Contact Broker & Dealmaker Frantz.”

The ad went on to include extensive descriptions of the individual lots, zoning calculations, lot coverage and the public waterfront access plan (as required by the new zoning regulations).


"Offers were being made daily on this piece," Joseph Kosofsky, a lawyer for Mr. Guttman, said in a May 4th NY Times story. "Everybody wants to be your partner."


One prospective buyer stood out: Baruch Singer, 52, a veteran developer. His offer did not have the sort of restrictive clauses and riders that Mr. Guttman found in the others, Mr. Kosofsky said.

"It was all cash," Mr. Kosofsky said. "It looked like a slam-dunk, in terms of a simple deal. They were going to buy it without any conditions or anything else."

Mr. Singer was involved in a dispute in 2000 with tenant groups and the federal Housing and Urban Development Department. The department blocked Mr. Singer from bidding on a Harlem property the department owned after it was alerted to a long record of complaints against him. Over the years, city housing officials have cited Mr. Singer's buildings for thousands of code violations.

According to the lawsuit Mr. Singer has filed in connection with the deal for the Greenpoint buildings, he planned to develop two of the property's six sites into condominiums quickly, and then pour the proceeds into the four remaining sites. Mr. Guttman agreed to help the deal through the maze that is familiar to anyone in theNew York City real estate business, the lawsuit states.


"All of it looked like it was a go," Mr. Kosofsky said.


Mr. Guttman had hired Perkins Eastman Architects to prepare a proposal for development of the site. Their proposal called for about 2.6 million square feet of residential space over 14 acres stretching from Oak Street to Greenpoint Avenue.


Several tall buildings were in the proposal, the biggest being 35 stories.


But the developers found that they could not begin work on the two fast-track sites until they won approval from the Department of City Planning for a "master plan" for the whole property.


That would have been impossible to do before the Jan. 17 closing date, the lawsuit states. A spokesman for the planning department said there was no requirement for a "master plan," but that a plan for waterfront access was required.


Mr. Singer's financing for the property fell through, Mr. Kosofsky said.


Mr. Singer contends in the lawsuit that they "orally agreed" to put off the closing date for at least six months. He says Mr. Guttman, continued to help him with the Department of City Planning after the closing date had passed.


"But Guttman has apparently had a change of heart and now pretends there was no agreement to extend the closing. The lawsuit says Mr. Guttman has kept the $42 million down payment. Some of the details of the troubled sale were reported in the May 3rd New York Sun.


Members of the Municipal Art Society and the Williamsburg Greenpoint Waterfront Preservation Alliance along with the Preservation League of New York State were attempting to preserve and Landmark the site.

J.D. Suss writes:


Underdog Reaction to Attacks on America
Jonathan D. Suss

Underdogs across America, those less enamored of the conventional American dream, must surely have seen the September 11 attacks differently than those tough-talking, flag-waving patriots popularly portrayed in the media. Not that the outrage was any less. But to underdogs the events and reactions since that day have conveyed deeper meanings.

To underdogs, the red, white and blue now symbolize a National Security State. Thus, the patriotic fervor stirred up by the attacks represents a misguided emotionalism built upon myths of American liberty and democracy – myths that are perhaps more telling of an earlier age. For America has long since lost its innocence. And in a complacency born of plenty, the character of the nation has been steadily eroding into self-indulgence. Self-righteous beliefs in our superior way of life, our super-power government, and our supposed role as world guardian of democracy, persist in the face of an irresponsible form of freedom at home, fueled by the trance-like influence of a corporate military-industrial/info-entertainment complex. And so patriotic sloganeering that seeks to resurrect past glories falls on increasingly dubious ears. Most of it sounds to me like ignorance parading in its own delusion. Monied interests now rule here in a bureaucratic government headed up mostly by the same weak-of-character, carbon-copy elitists that can now be found everywhere – in business, the media, the academy, science and the arts.

I am less a citizen of the United States of America than I am an inhabitant of the North American continent Native Americans call Turtle Island. The outrage of the attacks is found in the violence it has done to our sense of this place as our collective home. It upsets the cultural ecology of our belongingness in this space, a space not welcome to yet more invaders. All oppressed people have experienced this invasion displacement. For example, the Native Americans, Palestinians, Zulu, Vietnamese, Jews, Roma – all must have felt this frustrated rage at being deprived of the integrity of place. Americans, just now experiencing this same disabling sense of helplessness, act as if they are the first to ever suffer such an indignity, or they project an overly indignant air that such a calamity should befall a people of such privilege. It sickens one to witness the misplaced, over-inflated pride that feeds public discourse on TV talk shows, the Internet, and in call-in radio programs. One only hopes that having now been bruised, the wakened U.S. giant might start empathizing more with the real world. But, for now, underdogs can only howl.

African People's Solidarity Committee writes:

Diamond Industry Reps Scurry to Defend Profits
African People's Solidarity Committee

Earlier this week Martin Rapaport, President and CEO of diamonds.net and the Rapaport Diamond Report, issued a special statement concerning the ethical issues surrounding the diamond industry. This comes just a few days before representatives of the international diamond industry descend upon New York City for the 4th Annual Rapaport International Diamond Conference.

In Rapaport’s letter he admits that, “Over one million artisanal diamond diggers in West Africa are at grave risk in places like Sierra Leone, where 28% of children die before the age of 5 — the highest child mortality rate in the world. Many of the people mining our diamonds are so poor they cannot keep their children alive.” This is a startling confession from one of the most powerful figures of the diamond industry, an industry that previously claimed that they were beneficial to the people of Africa.

In the face of a mass movement and boycott against their industry, the diamond cartels are offering to self-regulate the brutally exploitative industry. They promise to set up non-profits and charities to build schools and create medical care for the diamond workers.

The African People’s Solidarity Committee rejects this public relations ploy. They are calling for nothing less than all of Africa’s resources under the control of the African working class itself. Africa is the richest continent on earth. Africans don’t need charity; they need control over their own land.

On February 5th, human rights activists will demonstrate at the New York City Hilton Hotel during the 4th Annual Rapaport International Diamond Conference. Protest organizer Robert Notowitz of the African People’s Solidarity Committee declares, “We have the responsibility to shut down an industry that ravages the land and labor of Africa to benefit the white world. For white society, the diamond is promoted to represent the ultimate expression of love. For Africa, the diamond trade has its origins in colonialism, with African people forced to labor on their own land under slave-like conditions for pennies a day. All diamonds are blood diamonds!”

Then in the evening of February 5th, a forum will be held at the Church of the Village, with speakers from the Uhuru (African Freedom) Movement, including Diop Olugbala, organizer of the Sean Bell Justice Tribunal, and Penny Hess, author of “Overturning the Culture of Violence”. Physicist Aisha Fields will discuss the Uhuru Movement’s clean water and sustainable electricity projects in Africa. The Church of the Village is located at 201 W. 13th Street in the West Village.

For more information visit www.boycottdiamonds.net

Pages