Radical media, politics and culture.
December 20, 2006 - 8:01pm -- autonomedia
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Revolution in the Post-Fordist Revolution?

Notes on the Internet as a Weapon of the Multitude"

Gene Ray

Is the Internet emerging as a viable site for what Paolo Virno calls a “non-servile republic,” a radical public sphere largely beyond the control of “administration”?


In 2005, four members of the collective Retort published Afflicted Powers, a compelling analysis of the new global mutation of primitive accumulation they call “military neo-liberalism.”[1] The book grew out of a broadsheet the group wrote for the global anti-war protests of 15 February 2003, which turned out to be the largest linked demonstrations in world history; “Neither Their War Nor Their Peace” offered two pages of “negative wisdom addressed to comrades in a dark and confusing time.”


The appalling destruction of Lebanon has spurred Retort to follow up these trenchant texts with a new broadsheet, this one bitterly titled "All Quiet on the Eastern Front.” Among its eleven paragraphs of lucid observations and critical propositions is the assertion that the “balance of power in the image-world is changing.” As never before, the reality “at the heart of modernity” has been exposed to view. “For more than a century, modernity and state terror from the air — modernity and mass civilian death — have been mutually constituent terms. But never before so instantly, so vividly, so ubiquitously.”[2] Retort points to the material basis of this shift with a biting quotation of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s whining complaints about the brutal new context in which Empire must fight its wars of systemic enforcement:

“Today we’re engaged in the first war in history — unconventional and irregular as it may be — in an era of e-mails, blogs, cell phones, Blackberrys, Instant Messaging, digital cameras, a global Internet with no inhibitions, hand-held videocameras, talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, satellite television. There’s never been a war fought in this environment before.”[3]

Scrutinising this list of demons haunting the sleep of the war technocrat-in-chief, we can rapidly separate apparatuses of corporate and public sector media subordinated to the rule of profit and state administration (talk radio, twenty-four-hour news broadcasts, satellite television) from independent means of production and uncensored networks of communications (all the other items on his hate list). It is furthermore clear that “a global Internet with no inhibitions” — the open, distributed network that makes possible the rapid and uncontrolled planetary dissemination of images and discourses — is the techno-material factor that links all the mobile micro-means of production and tips the balance of power in the image-world.

December 19, 2006 - 2:17am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Race Politics

Color and History: From the Invention of the White Race to the Invention of White Multiculturalism*

Yann Moulier Boutang

Translated by Lowe Laclau

We in our “civilized,” white and exceedingly developed democracies, despite twenty years of crises know surges of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism very well. It is easy to view such phenomena as a general return to a barbarism of inter-ethnic conflict such as those that shake the Wild Cities of Enki Bilal (from the Berlin of the Femme Piège, to Beirut by way of Sarajevo, or the Africa of resistance in Rwanda). As if times had become as rough and merciless as the “new look” of commercial capitalism. However, even if we leave aside the all against all ethnic wars, this supposed new state of nature that makes the market Leviathan more desirable, we are forced to draw up a doubly worrying assessment. Since the latter half of the Eighties, in the parliamentary democracies, the extreme right reconstructed themselves significantly on an institutional scale (the PEN in France, Haider in Austria, Pauline Hanson in Australia). One voter in ten no longer hesitated to cast his or her vote for a type of political program that the defeat of Fascism and Nazism had previously relegated in the sphere of the unnamable, the unpronounceable, or the unrepresentable. The second assessment is the relative inefficiency of the calls for tolerance and of democratic multiculturalism to reduce explosions of intolerance to a marginal and normal [sic] level.

Why have democracies seen themselves re-grow these venomous flowers, why is it that the “communicational act” is only made use of to keep police blunders and racist murders from turning into riots? Why so much inertia, why is there so much complacence before discourses on closing up borders and standing firm, discourses that earn the traditional right as well as the left, much desired voters, as has been shown with the issues of immigration regulation and border security? The response from the workers movement, from classical Marxism, from good natured Republicans, and even radical Americans is simple: in a society of class inequality, within an economy dominated by capitalist exploitation and domination, real democracy cannot exist, nor can pacified interethnic relations. One needs only search for who profits from the crime. The disjointedness of the multitude gives force to the multinationals etc. There's nothing completely false in summing it up in this manner, but there's also nothing completely persuasive about it either. It lacks some of the critical links within its reasoning, and this cuts down all operational and political character, relegating it to a sphere of moral testimony. Two books in English with very different styles and objectives propose exploring another track and of truly beginning the debate on the classical question of nation, race and class: a scouring essay from Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in an Multicultural Society (hereout WN) and two ambitious volumes from Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (hereout IWR1) and Vol 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (hereout IWR2).

The work from Ghassan Hage allows a diagnosis of the present situation of racism as well as the failures of multiculturalism. The two volumes from Theodore Allen make it possible to embrace another question at the other end of the historical chain of immigration: that of the colonization of catholic Ireland from the 16th to the 19th century and the concomitant enslavement of Blacks in the Virginia plantations. What relation would be demanded between multiculturalism, slavery and colonization? It is the question of social control through intermediaries because the normal intermediaries had not yet been set in place. What happens when a failed or too radical a polarization erodes the space of traditional political mediations?

December 19, 2006 - 2:06am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Race Politics

Color and History: From the Invention of the White Race to the Invention of White Multiculturalism*

Yann Moulier Boutang

Translated by Lowe Laclau

We in our “civilized,” white and exceedingly developed democracies, despite twenty years of crises know surges of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism very well. It is easy to view such phenomena as a general return to a barbarism of inter-ethnic conflict such as those that shake the Wild Cities of Enki Bilal (from the Berlin of the Femme Piège, to Beirut by way of Sarajevo, or the Africa of resistance in Rwanda). As if times had become as rough and merciless as the “new look” of commercial capitalism. However, even if we leave aside the all against all ethnic wars, this supposed new state of nature that makes the market Leviathan more desirable, we are forced to draw up a doubly worrying assessment. Since the latter half of the Eighties, in the parliamentary democracies, the extreme right reconstructed themselves significantly on an institutional scale (the PEN in France, Haider in Austria, Pauline Hanson in Australia). One voter in ten no longer hesitated to cast his or her vote for a type of political program that the defeat of Fascism and Nazism had previously relegated in the sphere of the unnamable, the unpronounceable, or the unrepresentable. The second assessment is the relative inefficiency of the calls for tolerance and of democratic multiculturalism to reduce explosions of intolerance to a marginal and normal [sic] level.

Why have democracies seen themselves re-grow these venomous flowers, why is it that the “communicational act” is only made use of to keep police blunders and racist murders from turning into riots? Why so much inertia, why is there so much complacence before discourses on closing up borders and standing firm, discourses that earn the traditional right as well as the left, much desired voters, as has been shown with the issues of immigration regulation and border security? The response from the workers movement, from classical Marxism, from good natured Republicans, and even radical Americans is simple: in a society of class inequality, within an economy dominated by capitalist exploitation and domination, real democracy cannot exist, nor can pacified interethnic relations. One needs only search for who profits from the crime. The disjointedness of the multitude gives force to the multinationals etc. There's nothing completely false in summing it up in this manner, but there's also nothing completely persuasive about it either. It lacks some of the critical links within its reasoning, and this cuts down all operational and political character, relegating it to a sphere of moral testimony. Two books in English with very different styles and objectives propose exploring another track and of truly beginning the debate on the classical question of nation, race and class: a scouring essay from Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in an Multicultural Society (hereout WN) and two ambitious volumes from Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (hereout IWR1) and Vol 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (hereout IWR2).

The work from Ghassan Hage allows a diagnosis of the present situation of racism as well as the failures of multiculturalism. The two volumes from Theodore Allen make it possible to embrace another question at the other end of the historical chain of immigration: that of the colonization of catholic Ireland from the 16th to the 19th century and the concomitant enslavement of Blacks in the Virginia plantations. What relation would be demanded between multiculturalism, slavery and colonization? It is the question of social control through intermediaries because the normal intermediaries had not yet been set in place. What happens when a failed or too radical a polarization erodes the space of traditional political mediations?

December 14, 2006 - 7:34pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Reflections on Tronti

Massimo De Angelis

From the commoner

It has been suggested to me, in the corridors of the Historical Materialism conference held over the week end, that what distinguishes what we may call, broadly speaking, autonomist marxism with other marxist approaches is the argument that the “working class” is the agent of transformation that pushes capital on the defence and forces its “economic” development rather then, on the contrary, being capital that “overdetermines” the rest by means of its agency. This suggestion furthermore is accompanied by the claim that this view is false, since capital has “more power.” In my view, the insight of 1960s operaismo with respect to working class agency were not falsified in light of 1980s capital’s agency, they were simply temporally bounded. Class struggle, in a process-like manner, have at least two broad actors, not one, and their tragic-comic struggle develop through highs and lows for both sides, “scoring points” for both sides. The process of this historical development of struggle, this very process of “point scoring” for one or the other, is the stuff of capitalist development. The problem is that acknowledging this does not give us any hint of how to go beyond capital and the very specific form of struggle shaping its development.

And I think it is at this point that it is important to underline that what distinguishes “autonomist marxism” in its operaiste roots to other forms of marxism, is a specific theoretical attitude, one that takes the processes that traditionally we understand as “political” and “economic.” as one. Its unique political methodology is one that allows to ask research questions as part of a heretic research program, heretic because it sees the world from one side, that which is constituted within, against and beyond capital’s own value program, and thus its broad horizon is the end of capitalism and the begining of history. It is therefore a stand from where to ask questions as articulated to walks of struggle, rather than reading the processes making up our world as something that have already been explained away by some form of marxist theory.

December 13, 2006 - 9:43am -- autonomedia
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons

Anna Nimus

A Genealogy of Authors’ Property Rights

The author has not always existed. The image of the author as a wellspring of originality, a genius guided by some secret compulsion to create works of art out of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, is an 18th century invention.

This image continues to influence how people speak about the “great artists” of history, and it also trickles down to the more modest claims of the intellectual property regime that authors have original ideas that express their unique personality, and therefore have a natural right to own their works — or to sell their rights, if they should choose.

Although these ideas appear self-evident today, they were an anomaly during their own time. The different pre-Enlightenment traditions did not consider ideas to be original inventions that could be owned because knowledge was held in common. Art and philosophy were products of the accumulated wisdom of the past. There were no authors — in the sense of original creators and final authorities — but only masters of various crafts (sculpture, painting, poetry, philosophy) whose task was to appropriate existing knowledge, re-organize it, make it specific to their age, and transmit it further. Artists and sages were messengers, and their ability to make knowledge manifest was considered a gift from the gods. Art was governed by a gift economy: aristocratic patronage was a gift in return for the symbolic gift of the work. Even the neoclassical worldview that immediately preceded Romanticism viewed art as imitation of nature and the artist as a craftsman who transmitted ideas that belonged to a common culture.

November 27, 2006 - 10:59am -- autonomedia
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Solve et Coagula writes:

"Islamic Banking:
Banking Without Usury or Interest"

Institute of Islamic Banking

Islamic banks appeared on the world scene as active players over two decades ago. But "many of the principles upon which Islamic banking is based have been commonly accepted all over the world, for centuries rather than decades".


The basic principle of Islamic banking is the prohibition of riba (usury — or interest):

"While a basic tenant of Islamic banking — the outlawing of riba, a term that encompasses not only the concept of usury, but also that of interest — has seldom been recognised as applicable beyond the Islamic world, many of its guiding principles have. The majority of these principles are based on simple morality and common sense, which form the bases of many religions, including Islam.

"The universal nature of these principles is immediately apparent even at a cursory glance of non-Muslim literature. Usury was prohibited in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, while Shakespeare and many other writers, particularly those writing in the 19th century, have attacked the barbarity of the practice. Much of the morality championed by Victorian writers such as Dickens — ranging from the equitable distribution of wealth through to man's fundamental right to work — is clearly present in modern Islamic society.


"Although the western media frequently suggest that Islamic banking in its present form is a recent phenomenon, in fact, the basic practices and principles date back to the early part of the seventh century." (Islamic Finance: A Euromoney Publication, 1997)

It is evident that Islamic finance was practiced predominantly in the Muslim world throughout the Middle Ages, fostering trade and business activities. In Spain and the Mediterranean and Baltic States, Islamic merchants became indispensable middlemen for trading activities. It is claimed that many concepts, techniques, and instruments of Islamic finance were later adopted by European financiers and businessmen.

November 25, 2006 - 12:15pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Terraces & peripheries. Left snobbery & the radical right

Emilio Quadrelli

If anyone still had any doubts much has happened to dispel them. Many of the terraces of the Italian football stadiums are controlled to an increasing degree by the radical right. This is a fact. And it is necessary to start from here to attack, politically and not morally, a phenomenon which has been spreading for some time in metropolitan peripheries and which only becomes worthy of attention when it gains heavy media visibility. Only in the presence of swastikas, celtic crosses or explicit holocaust references dominating stadiums are many people stupefied, as if they were in a remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and they forget at least a thing or two.

First, they [i.e. the fans associated with the radical right] don’t come from the moon, they also have a social life outside the stadiums, lived quite coherently with the ‘values’ expressed on the terraces. In other words, adherence to the nazi ‘lifestyle’ is not something purely symbolic and extemporaneous, adopted in a framework where carnival prevails, but a total and in many cases totalizing ‘lifestyle,’ with effects on everyday life. The second thing is the consent and legitimation which – without any kind of forcing, it should be noted – they can claim across areas which cannot necessarily be reductively described as belonging to the world of the radical right. To speak only of the Roman situation, it is worth recalling the ‘dead boy’ derby match.

This spurious story was circulated by some hardcore fringe fans, regarded by the ‘experts’ as marginal, isolated from the rest of the crowd, but it immediately became the unquestionable truth for the whole stadium. Essentially the story accused the security forces of killing a young boy during the baton charge that preceded the match. The denial by senior officers and by the highest municipal authorities met with a long deafening, chorus of ‘shame, shame’ (from Lazio and Roma fans alike), which left little room for interpretation and showed that, when it came to choosing between the institutional truth and the illegitimate truth of ‘small groups’ of ‘unruly fans’ the whole stadium showed little doubt about which side it was on. And this is only one of many episodes which could be cited. Posing a few questions, then, seems legitimate to say the least. As they are not aliens, the ‘stadium extremists’ do not come from outer space, they inhabit urban areas which are not particularly hard to identify: the peripheries.

November 21, 2006 - 3:20pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Nothing is what democracy looks like: Openness, horizontality and the movement of movements

Rodrigo Nunes

Networked, horizontal forms have been at the centre of many of the political debates of the last ten years, and often been treated alternatively as the limit (by its enemies) and the solution (by its proponents) to the problems of organisation of resistance to global capitalism. This has unfortunately meant that critiques carried out ‘from the inside’ – i.e., by those who have experienced and share a general belief in them – have been much rarer than those carried out by partisans of other forms of organisation, resulting in much back-patting and triumphalism, but few discussions of anxieties and frustrations that seem widely shared; a problem that is only enhanced by the fact that so often it is felt that horizontality must be ‘defended’ from its detractors.(1)

It is this kind of internal critique that this paper attempts to do. In order to do that, it envisages a demystification of openness and horizontality, showing how it is often presented in complete absence of context and pointing to its inherent contradictions and dead-ends. The point of doing this is not to engage another debate along the lines of ‘less’ or ‘more’ horizontality, or horizontality versus verticality; the idea is rather to render these very notions problematic, and by affirming their problematic nature, to argue for a democratic practice that tackles this nature head on.

November 20, 2006 - 11:46am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

In the Wake… After the G20

Dave Antagonism

So what happened at the G20 in Melbourne? On one hand it was business as usual. The G20 met and seemed to function as planned with both agreement and disagreement within the continual entrenchment of the capitalist global order. Predictably, despite the boosterism of groups like Make Poverty History, the G20 did nothing to ameliorate even the most horrific consequences of capitalism. Yet something happened outside: a relatively small group of protesters produced a political event, a moment on rupture that is full of possibilities and dangers. What we do now after that event, how we trace the lines of struggle that it opened up is crucial. There are both opportunities and pitfalls ahead and the telling of the tale, the reflection on our experiences and the sharing of stories is crucial. Because there is not just one version of what happened: indeed part of the power and joy experiencing something like the mobilization is being part of collective moment that has many points of origins and many experiences. In the normally daily life of capitalism we have only two views: that of the machinery of public opinion, and that of the isolated individual. In moments of upsurge something else happens. Let's find a richness and continues to enrich this.

But there are forces that work to close down the possibilities that have been opened by such an event. In this case, they are police repression, the implemented of a simulation of the events by the media, and division and recrimination amongst those that took part. It is understandable that those that have gone beyond the law want to protect themselves, it is also understandable that the power of the media is so great that even those who took part in the actions can feel disorientated by the way there own participation is reflected back on them, and in a movement that is both small and diverse, that lacks a common language of communication differences can often become divisions – especially when so much is on the line. This does not take away from how important it is to resist these things, to keep the space open, that these struggles opened and try to connect it with others and other struggles.

November 16, 2006 - 3:03pm -- autonomedia
Analysis & Polemic
Independent Media

Memoirs of a Video Activist

Joanne Richardson, Subsol

I left Bucharest when I was 9. My parents were political refugees. We
received political asylum in Austria and later moved to New York. I grew
up poor but privileged, in the sense that I had an education at some of
the best schools in America, social factories for the production of
Marxist intellectuals. And then I dropped out of my PhD, left the US, and
returned to Romania to become a video activist. For many years I was
weaned on the same canon and rules of etiquette as most Western media
activists. But they always seemed strange to me, as if I was seeing them
outside their frame and hearing them in a foreign language that I only
partly understood.


What does video activism mean today? From large demonstrations against the
World Trade Organization to small protests against Sky TV in Rome, you can
see almost as many people with video cameras as protestors. They go where
television cameras don't, providing live news about events that are
neglected or misrepresented, documenting police abuse, or challenging the
neutrality of the mass-media. Recent video activism has its roots in the
alternative media movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Although an
oppositional press with an alternative content has existed since the
nineteenth century, it privileged intellectuals as experts and maintained
structural hierarchies of knowledge. What was different about many of the
social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was the desire to provoke social
change not through alternative ideas but through the process of production
itself, by turning spectators into producers and eliminating the
difference between experts who create culture and its passive consumers.

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