Radical media, politics and culture.

Intimations of Recession

Paul Krugman

These are the dog days of summer, but there's a chill in the air. Suddenly —
really just in the last few weeks — people have starting talking seriously
about a possible recession. And it's not just economists who seem worried.
Goldman Sachs recently reported that the confidence of chief executives at
major corporations has plunged; a clear majority of C.E.O.'s now say that
conditions in the world economy, and the U.S. economy in particular, are
worsening rather than improving.


On the face of it, this loss of faith seems strange. Recent growth and jobs
numbers have been disappointing, but not disastrous.
But economic numbers don't speak for themselves. They always have to be
interpreted as part of a story. And the latest numbers, while not that bad
taken out of context, seem inconsistent with the stories optimists were
telling about the U.S. economy.


The key point is that the forces that caused a recession five years ago
never went away. Business spending hasn't really recovered from the slump it
went into after the technology bubble burst: nonresidential investment as a
share of G.D.P., though up a bit from its low point, is still far below its
levels in the late 1990's. Also, the trade deficit has doubled since 2000,
diverting a lot of demand away from goods produced in the United States.

Interview with John Sinclair

Interview by Dean Kuipers

From the LA City Beat


The poet, activist, and counterculture impresario on weed,
Black Panthers, and the death throes of America the Beautiful


American culture has closed up around John Sinclair. There's
just not enough freedom in it any more -- not enough free
time, not enough outrage, not enough difference between one
place and the next, not enough high culture or genuine
bohemia, not enough Sun Ra or Dylan. Anyone who didn't live
through his era -- or, more particularly, through his life
-- might not know what he's talking about. Poet, founder of
a 1960s arts collective called the Detroit Artists Workshop,
and manager of the proto-punk rock band MC5, Sinclair
co-founded the White Panther Party in 1968 after one of his
heroes, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, said in an
interview that the best thing white people could do to
support their struggle was to start such a thing. So he did.
And paid the price, serving a couple years of a
nine-and-a-half-to ten-year prison term for marijuana
distribution after police started swarming the group.

He was released after John Lennon and others put on a
concert in his defense, but that probably wouldn't happen
today. The White Panther Party credo of "rock 'n' roll,
dope, and fucking in the streets" is completely impossible
in a world where only millionaires are considered real
artists and Americans happily embrace domestic wiretapping
and corporate spook culture. Well, hell, it was impossible
back then, too. But the difference is: Sinclair and a
million other beautiful dreamers believed it.

"Peace-for-War"

Brian Holmes

The concept I’m going to present draws directly from the work of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. It describes the economic phases of "depth" and "breadth," and correlates them with the first- and second-order cybernetics of control.


It attempts to situate the functions of cultural-communicational labor within these economic phases. It questions those autonomist Marxists who thought it would be possible to transform a broadly expansionary phase of capitalism, like that of the ‘90s, into a qualitatively different society. It’s not a polemic, but seeks to open up a field of strategic debate. It doesn’t assert a future, but observes the unfolding of the present into the depths of violence, which has robbed resistance movements of their potential, again. The concept is Peace-for-War.


At stake here is society itself: the really existing forms of social cooperation. The Argentinean activist, Ezequiel Adamovsky, writes about exactly that: “Today, the division of labor is so deep, that each minute, even without realizing it, each of us is relying on the labor of millions of people from all over the world.” (1) This text, the words, the images, my voice through the microphone or over the Internet, is literally brought to you by the labors of Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe combined. The question is, what guides the dynamics of our worldwide cooperation? How is order maintained? And why does this “order” descend periodically into chaos, as it’s doing now in the Middle East?

Adamovsky points out that nothing encourages even asking such questions, much less answering them. “In the capitalist system, paradoxically enough, the institutions that enable and organize such a high level of social co-operation are the very same that separate us from the other, and make us isolated individuals without responsibility with regards to other people. Yes, I am talking about the market and the (its) state. Buying and consuming products, and voting for candidates in an election, involves no answerability. These are actions performed by isolated individuals.”


Order will not provide a language to explain its chaos. The essence of contemporary power is to provoke crisis and to ride it out toward profit, without revealing strategies or goals. The effect of such huge unknowns is to make people cling to their identities and their operative routines, for fear that the public disruption will spread into their private lives. Without an interpretation of capital – indeed, of power – there can be no opposition. The first thing that resistance movements are lacking is a common language to describe, predict and oppose the maneuvers of the most powerful groups in the world.

"The Fidel Castro I Know"

Gabriel García Márquez

His fondness for words. His power of seduction. He hunts for a
problem wherever it is. The impelling force of inspiration is befits
his style. The breadth of his tastes is very well reflected in his
books. He gave up his cigars so as to have the moral authority to
fight smoking. He likes to prepare recipes with a sort of scientific
fervor. He keeps in excellent shape through several hours of daily
exercise and frequent swimming. Invincible patience. Strict
discipline. He's drawn toward the unexpected by the force of his
imagination. Learning to work is as important as learning to rest.


Fatigued by talking, he rests by talking. He writes well and likes to
do it. His greatest motivation in life is the emotion of risk. The
rostrum of an improviser seems to be his perfect ecological element.
When he starts speaking, his voice is always hard to hear and his
course is uncertain, but he takes advantage of anything to gain
ground, little by little, until he takes a kind of swipe and takes
possession of his audience. He's the inspiration: the irresistible
and dazzling state of grace only denied by those who lack the glory
to feel it. He's the quintessential anti-dogmatist.


He's been sufficiently talented to incorporate the ideas of José
Martí, his bedtime author, to a Marxist revolution's bloodstream. The
essence of his own thoughts lies perhaps in his certainty that
working with the masses means first of all taking care of
individuals.

Anonymous Comrade writes:


"Delusional Expectations"

John Chuckman

At this writing, Israel has killed six hundred civilians in Lebanon, including more than one hundred children, and killed another one hundred and fifty in Gaza. It has created hundreds of thousands of refugees and destroyed enough bridges and power stations and apartments to create misery for years to come.


Nothing is more dishonest than attempting to justify this barbarism with "Islamist fundamentalists declare their goal openly to destroy the state of Israel and kill Jews."


There is no possibility that Israel can be destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists: the notion is simply a fantasy. This is so not just because of Israel's ready willingness to bomb and kill, but because of great-power guarantees. It is so also because no Arab state believes any longer that Israel’s destruction is a sensible or possible goal, despite their leaders’ public rhetoric. And it is true because the enemies Israel claims are so threatening, organizations such as Hezbollah or Hamas, are militarily weak by any rational standard of calculation.

Apocalypse No!

Juan Santos


From the beginning, this culture—civilization—
has been a culture of occupation. -
Derrick Jensen

It's scripted: a tragedy whose end is embedded in its beginnings, an
unfolding logic whose conclusion is the inevitable result of its premises.

It's simple. And obvious. We find ourselves in the midst of the most
rapid mass extinction in Earth's history; we have the power to all-but
end life on Earth. We can do so with nuclear weapons, today, in Iran,
or simply by turning the ignition switch on our automobiles and
gliding over paved surfaces where nothing can live. A little more
carbon dioxide, just a little, will tip the scale - unleashing our
potential for matching the greatest mass extinction ever – the one
called The Great Dying.

Science has given us until roughly 2012 to take radical action to
change the course we're on. In the next six years, they tell us, we
will determine the fate of the Earth.
With the US and its white colonial puppet Israel on a nuclear
collision course with Iran and Syria, we may have less time than that.

250 million years ago 95% of all species died. Only one large land
animal was left. Carbon dioxide and methane – the two most deadly of
the greenhouse gases – were responsible. We can do it again. We've
followed the script, we know our lines, and we've reached the final scene.

For that reason, this is a most exciting juncture for the Armageddon
mongers among us.

That's most of who believe in the colonizer's religion, in the Beast,
the Great Tribulation, the Four Horsemen, the Seven Seals, and the
other visions of St. John the Apocalyptic, whose hallucinogenic
fantasies penetrated clearly into the essence, unveiling the
inevitable end, the direction this civilization must head and the end
it must reach.

Angelus Novus writes:


"Invaders from Marx:
On the Uses of Marxian Theory, and the Difficulties of a Contemporary Reading
– A Critical Engagement with Karl Heinz Roth and others"
Michael Heinrich


[The following text is the slightly reworked version of an article which appeared on 21 September 2005 in Jungle World, a leftist German weekly newspaper. In a previous issue, Karl Heinz Roth, one of the main German representatives of Operaismo, had argued that some important Marxian categories are not able to grasp contemporary capitalism. The text at hand answers this critique, stressing the difference between Marxian theory and traditional Marxism, emphasizing the “new reading of Marx”, which developed through the last decades. The German text can be found at the website of the author: here]

In the past 120 years, Marx has been read and understood in widely varying ways. In the Social Democratic and Communist worker’s movement, Marx was viewed as the great Economist, who proved the exploitation of the workers, the unavoidable collapse of capitalism, and the inevitability of proletarian revolution. This sort of “Marxist political economy” was embedded in a Marxist worldview (Weltanschauung) which provided answers for all pre-existing historical, social, and philosophical questions.

This omniscient Marxism was analytically useless, but was eminently well-suited as a means of propaganda and as an instrument of authority against those who questioned the party line. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, a Left critique of such Marxism emerged, but was nonetheless choked off by Stalinism and Fascism and did not receive a hearing in the Cold War era. This situation began to change in the 1960s, as Marx was read anew during the rise of the student movement and protests against the Vietnam War. A New Left arose beyond the classical worker’s movement which saw itself positioned on two fronts: on the one hand against the global capitalist system, on the other hand against an authoritarian and dogmatically petrified Communist movement, which was viewed as a force propping up domination.

This new Left was anything but unified. As regards the critique of Marxist orthodoxy, one can distinguish, to strongly simplify, between two major directions. One tendency criticized the trade unions and left political parties for viewing the workers as an object to be managed and not as a subject capable of struggle and resistance. The theoretical foundations of this controlling, dominating relationship to the working class were located in the objectivism and economism of traditional Marxism. Class struggle, as opposed to objective economic laws, was emphasized as the decisive motor of societal development.

This meant that, in this particular reading of Marx, one either alleged an economism in Marx’s “ripe”, economic works, or emphasized those passages which dealt with struggle and social classes. Such a direction was especially represented in the 1960s by the tendency of Italian Operaismo, which spread in the 1970s to other countries. In West Germany, it was primarily Karl Heinz Roth and the journal Autonomie who oriented towards this approach (cf Wright 2002 for a history of Italian Operaismo; texts of Karl Heinz Roth can be found in Frombeloff 1993).

Interview with Gore Vidal

David Barsamian, The Progressive

Gore Vidal is a gold mine of quips and zingers. And his vast knowledge of literature and history—particularly American—makes for an impressive figure. His razor-sharp tongue lacerates the powerful. He does it with aplomb, saying, “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” He has a wry sense of noblesse oblige: “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”


Now eighty, he lives in the Hollywood hills in a modest mansion with immodest artwork. I felt I was entering a museum of Renaissance art. A stern painting of the Emperor Constantine was looking down upon us as we sat in his majestic living room. A Buddha statue from Thailand stood nearby. But all was not somber. He had a Bush doll with a 9/11 bill sticking out of it on a table behind us.


His aristocratic pedigree is evident not just in his artistic sophistication but also in his locution. In a war of words, few can contend with Vidal.


“I’m a lover of the old republic and I deeply resent the empire our Presidents put in its place,” he declares.

Dorothy Day: A true Christian, a ‘dangerous radical’

Tom Deegan

From The Chronicle


“The impulse to stand up against the state and go to jail, rather than serve, is an instinct for penance; To take on some of the suffering of the world — to share in it.” — Dorothy Day, February 1969.

For many years, I had only a vague knowledge who Dorothy Day was. I knew that in the 1920s she and her spiritual mentor, a French peasant and religious philosopher named Peter Maurin, founded a newspaper called, The Catholic Worker, and that in her time she was viewed by many to be a “dangerous radical.” She was considered such a menace that J. Edgar Hoover, that pillar of goodness and decency (cough!), even kept a file on her. Quite frankly, I’ve come to a point in my life where I’m seriously disappointed in anyone who lived during that period who didn’t have their own little place of honor in Hoover’s file cabinet. Think about it — Charlie Chaplin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, John Lennon — that’s pretty good company to be in!

But other than that basic outline, my knowledge of her life was, to say the least, peripheral. She was always merely a footnote in someone else’s biography.

Late last summer, while browsing through the used book store at the library in Cornwall, I happened upon a copy of the book, “By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day.” After reading it, a whole new world opened up for me and I found myself exploring everything connected to this good and decent woman and her beautiful life. She is, I believe, a saint.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"From Beirut"

Bilal El-Amine

Hi everyone. First of all, I am fine as are family and friends. We’re scattered in different places, some still in the south, some in Tyre, the rest in Beirut and its surroundings. Those who live in the southern suburbs where Hizbullah is based managed to leave before the latest strikes and are safe with relatives.

As most of you know, Hizbullah carried out a bold operation a few days ago and managed to capture two Israeli soldiers. The resistance has been saying for quite some time now that it intends to free the remaining Lebanese prisoners in Israel, most prominently Samir Qantar. Dubbed the “dean of the prisoners,” Qantar is the longest serving Arab prisoner in Israel. He was to be released along with other Lebanese prisoners in a swap between Hizbullah and Israel. The Israeli government voted not to release him and two others and stupidly kept the prisoner file open.

The Hizbullah operation was an attempt to put an end to the matter. There were several previous unsuccessful attempts that were costly to the resistance. This operation according to Nasrallah, the general-secretary of Hizbullah, was months in planning and its timing, which has been endlessly criticized, may have been logistical more than anything else.

In light of Israel’s ferocious response, it is worth noting that the capture of the two Israeli soldiers was a pure military operation and did not as much scratch an Israeli civilian. Israel’s counter is exactly the opposite—collective punishment of the civilian population by destroying the country’s infrastructure and committing ugly massacres against families and fleeing refugees as they did yesterday in the south. Who’s the terrorist in this case, even by the self-serving definitions peddled in Washington.

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