Radical media, politics and culture.

Ezequiel Adamovsky writes:

"Autonomous Politics and its Problems:
Thinking the Passage from Social to Political"
Ezequiel Adamovsky


Part One:
Two Hypotheses on a
New Strategy for an Autonomous Politics

My aim in this article is to present some hypotheses on issues of strategy for anti-capitalist emancipatory movements. The idea is to rethink the conditions for an effective politics, with the capacity to radically change the society we live in.

Even if I will not have the space to analyze concrete cases, these reflections are not a purely "theoretical" endeavor, but spring from the observation of a series of movements I had the chance to be part of — the movement of neighbor's assemblies in Argentina, some processes of the World Social Forum, and other global networks — or that I followed closely in the past years — the piquetero (unemployed) movement also in Argentina, and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

From the viewpoint of strategy, the current emancipatory movements can be said to be in two opposite situations (somewhat schematically). The first one is that in which they manage to mobilize a great deal of social energy in favor of a political project, but they do that in a way that make them fall in the traps of "heteronomous politics".

By "heteronomous" I refer to the political mechanisms by means of which all that social energy ends up being channeled in a way that benefits the interests of the ruling class or, at least, minimize the radical potential of that popular mobilization. This is, for example, the fate of Brazil's PT under Lula, and also of some social movements (for example certain sections of the feminist movement) that turned into single-issue lobby organizations with no connection to any broader radical movement.

The second situation is that of those movements and collectives that reject any contact with the state and with heteronomous politics in general (parties, lobbies, elections, etc.) only to find themselves reduced to small identity-groups with little chances to have a real impact in terms of radical change. This is the case, for example, of some of the unemployed movements in Argentina, but also of many anti-capitalist small collectives throughout the world. The cost of their political "purity" is the inability to connect with larger sections of society.

To be sure, this is just a schematic picture: there are many experiments here and there of new strategic paths that may escape those two dead-end situations (the most visible example being that of the Zapatistas and their "Sixth Declaration"). The reflections I present here are aimed at contributing to those explorations.

"Inequality Counts"

The Nation

Every three years since 1989, the Federal Reserve Board has prepared a
Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which carefully measures the net worth of
all households in the nation — that is, the total assets owned by all
Americans. The survey, the most complete and thorough analysis of individual
wealth, summarizes the financial resources of different groups of the
population, such as bank accounts, stocks, bonds, business assets and real
estate. The most recent report, issued early in April 2006, details the
massive inequality of wealth in the United States between a small number of
households at the top of the income scale and those in the bottom half. This
report and other similar studies emphasize that this wealth inequality is
growing and is becoming a permanent part of our society.


The latest report examined the distribution of wealth in 2004 and makes
detailed comparisons showing the change in wealth among various population
groups. It notes the following:


The total net worth of all Americans in 1989 was $25 trillion (in 2004
dollars). Of that amount, the top 1 percent owned 30 percent, or $7.775
trillion. The bottom half owned 3 percent of the total, or $763 billion.

Fifteen years later, in 2004, the total wealth of all Americans had doubled
to $50.25 trillion. The top 1 percent of the population now owns 33.4
percent of the total, or $16.774 trillion. Their percentage share of the
total has increased by more than 3 percent in fifteen years. At the same
time, the total wealth owned by the bottom 50 percent increased to $1.278
trillion, but its percentage of total wealth declined from 3 percent to 2.5
percent in the same time period.


Thus the wealth of the top 1 percent was ten times the wealth of the bottom
50 percent in 1989. Fifteen years later, the wealth of the top 1 percent was
thirteen times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent.

Anonymous Comrade writes:


"The Iceman Cometh"

Canada's New Prime Minister, Stephan Harper, Starts Governing

John Chuckman

Stephan Harper's first budget, while making little economic and social sense, makes a great deal of political sense. Tidbits of spending are distributed to enough disparate groups to aim at luring a majority-making coalition of diverse interests. At the same time, Harper toughly enforces quiet from party members known for blurting out embarrassing, socially-backward views.


His minority government represents little more than an intense public relations effort to achieve majority government, free of existing artificial restraints. The hazards this represents are suggested even under current restraints.


Why do I say the budget makes little economic sense? Every trained economist, including Harper, knows that skewing taxes back to favor consumption - his lowering of the GST (Goods and Services Tax) - is in principle unsound policy.


But if you were determined to re-tilt taxes to favor consumption, a tiny change is not the way to do it, because it is costly and inefficient to re-set the system for a consumer gain of one percent. A huge effort is now needed to re-program or replace countless cash registers and calculators, not to mention the reprinting of forms, receipts, and reports of many kinds.


In economics, often, events that mean one thing for individuals mean something else for the community. Thus, Harper's small change in the GST, which will be almost imperceptible to consumers in their individual purchases, still will manage to deprive the federal treasury of a substantial annual sum.


The measure does keep a campaign promise, but it was never a sensible promise, tailored, as it was, to appeal to people's prejudice towards a tax that features in most purchases, a promise offered without explaining the necessary consequences for federal finances.

Meet the Shock Troops of the Christian Youth
Battle Cry for Theocracy!

Sunsara Taylor


If you've been waiting until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in "God's army" to get alarmed, wait no longer.


In recent weeks, Battle Cry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit and this weekend they plan to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.

The Poor Man's Air Force

A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920)
tomdispatch.com

You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!
-- Anarchist warning (1919)


On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."

nolympics writes:


"Car Bombs with Wings:
A History of the Car Bomb" (Part 2)
Mike Davis

The CIA's Car Bomb University (the 1980s)

"The CIA officers that Yousef worked with closely impressed upon him one rule: never use the terms sabotage or assassination when speaking with visiting congressmen." — Steve Coll, Ghost Wars

Gunboat diplomacy had been defeated by car bombs in Lebanon, but the Reagan administration and, above all, CIA Director William Casey were left thirsting for revenge against Hezbollah. "Finally in 1985," according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in Veil, his book on Casey's career, "he worked out with the Saudis a plan to use a car bomb to kill [Hezbollah leader] Sheikh Fadlallah who they determined was one of the people behind, not only the Marine barracks, but was involved in the taking of American hostages in Beirut… It was Casey on his own, saying, ‘I‘m going to solve the big problem by essentially getting tougher or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon — the car bomb.'"


"Even Death if it's Necessary"
The Other Campaign's Challenge to the Rich and Powerful

Hermann Bellinghausen y Emir Olivares

Mexico City, May 1, 2006. — "Even death if it's necessary," is the phrase which Subcomandante Marcos has heard the most in the south and center of the country, expressed by groups most below to repudiate neoliberalism: indigenous, women, campesinos, small business people, workers, children, elders, students, exploited workers. "Even death if it's necessary" was the phrase with which the Zapatista delegate returned, after five years, to the heart of Mexico. Which is the same that he heard in Chiapas before 1994, "when women, men, children and old ones decided to rise up in arms against the supreme government" he recalled, in reference to the Zapatista villages in whose name he arrived here for the commemoration of the "other" May 1st.

nolympics writes:


"The Poor Man's Air Force:
A History of the Car Bomb" (Part 1)
Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920)

"You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!" — Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company.

He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon — packed with dynamite and iron slugs — exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

knabb@bopsecrets.org writes:

Colbert Skewers Bush

Ken Knabb


Comedian Stephen Colbert's keynote speech at the White House Correspondents'
Association dinner last Saturday may represent a new stage in the crumbling
of the Bush regime's image from within the dominant spectacle itself. The
following link gives a Windows Media clip of the last 15 minutes —
here . The entire talk
(about 25 minutes) can be viewed in three parts here —
here .


It's a bizarre experience because most of the audience was decidedly not
sympathetic. Not only was Bush himself sitting a few feet away at the same
table along with various other political bigwigs, but the major portion of
the audience was the very journalists who with rare exceptions have treated
the Bush regime with kid gloves over the last five years, and who were
satirized almost as scathingly as Bush himself. So some of Colbert's
funniest remarks are received with a deafening silence, and the rare moments
of laughter are brief and uneasy, the audience obviously not having expected
such a scandal and wondering how they were supposed to take it.

'Organised Networks: Transdisciplinarity and New Institutional Forms'

Ned Rossiter


The social-technical dynamics of ICT-based networks constitute
organisation in ways substantively different from networked
organisations (unions, state, firms, universities). My interest in
this paper is to say a few things about the process of scalar
transformation and transdisciplinarity as they relate to the
invention of new institutional forms. Having established these
background conditions, processes and practices, I will then move on
to the topic of autonomous education.

Institutions function to organise social relations. It follows, then,
that the social-technical dynamics peculiar to a range of digital
media technologies (mailing lists, collaborative blogs, wikis,
content management systems) institute new modes of networked
sociality. It is easy to dismiss this process of emergent
institutionalisation. Many would assert that it simply results in a
bureaucratisation and rigidity of social-technical communication
systems whose default setting is one of flows, decentralisation,
horizontality, etc. I would suggest such knee-jerk, technically
incorrect responses risk a disengagement from the political and thus
from politics. There is a passivity that attends this kind of
position. Moreover, it is a position that fails the politics of
reappropriating the psychic, social and semiotic territory of
institutions. The process of instituting networks involves a movement
toward the strategic rather than tactical dimension of net politics.
Another reason to turn towards the strategic dimension has to do with
the short-termism that accompanies many tactical projects. The logic
of the tactic is one of situated intervention. And then it
disappears. There are of course some notable exceptions -- indymedia,
makrolab and the Yes Men come to mind as quite long-term experiments
in networks and tactical media; yet these exceptions are not, I would
suggest, instances of transdisciplinarity.

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