Radical media, politics and culture.
April 4, 2005 - 11:52am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes: "This article was published in Green Pepper Magazine's "Life Beyond the Market" issue.

"Community Currency Systems:

Formal Mutual Aid Networks with Anti-Capitalist Potential"

Andrew Willis

Anti-authoritarian anti-capitalists have two broad imperatives to guide our activism: the need to raise awareness of capitalist deficiency, and to begin to replace or supplement capitalism. For the latter imperative, we have two options: replace capitalism with another system outright, waiting until we have the consummate theoretical frameworks and public support to begin replacement on a wide scale. Or, we can build parallel institutions to begin experimenting with implementation of alternate systems.


For those of us impatient with the infinite holding pattern requisite of the former, experimenting with community-based mutual aid networks, systems, mechanisms or institutions reflective of cooperative, horizontal organization both represents an active, if incipient, embodiment of our ultimate goal and creates an effective outreach mechanism for education for critical consciousness.

April 4, 2005 - 8:37am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Nietzsche and the Anarchists"

Spencer Sunshine

[Spencer Sunshine recently completed editing the late John Moore's new anthology I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. This essay appeared originally in Fifth Estate #367, Winter 2004–2005.
Fifth Estate subscriptions are available for $10 (US), international $20.
PO Box 201016, Ferndale MI 48220]

The proposal to combine Nietzsche and anarchism must sound audacious to many people. Even if one doesn't hold to the old belief that the "working class" (whoever that might be today) are the only ones who can make revolutionary change, wasn't Nietzsche an influence on the fascists, and an individualist who championed the right of the strong to rule over the weak? And doesn't Nietzsche himself repeatedly denounce the anarchist movement of his day, calling them "dogs" and accusing them of ressentiment?

April 2, 2005 - 10:11pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"The Tribe of Moles" (Part Two)
Sergio Bologna

[This essay continues from here.]

A New Political Cycle of Struggles:The Generalisation of the Political Behaviour of the Mass Worker

But if the identity of the mass worker as political subject was now dead — long live the mass worker! A political cycle of struggles as deeply rooted and powerful as that which led from the mass confrontation of Piazza Statuto (Turin, 1961) to the generalised offensive of the Hot Autumn (1969) — throughout which the mass worker of large-scale industry had acted as the central driving force — could hardly be expected to disappear without a trace! It was bound to set in motion a whole series of secondary effects and irreversible mechanisms, imposing its specific hegemony on the composition of the entire class.

April 2, 2005 - 9:45pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"The Tribe of Moles" (Part One)

Sergio Bologna (1977)

This article is a provisional attempt to trace the internal development of the autonomous class movement in Italy, which led to the explosive confrontation around the University occupations in Spring 1977. Such an analysis is only meaningful if it allows us to uncover the new class composition underlying these struggles, and to indicate the first elements of a programme to advance and further generalise the movement.


Here we analyse the movement primarily in its relation to the Italian political system and the changes it has undergone through the period of crisis since 1968. With the Historic Compromise strategy of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) since 1974, the form of the State has taken a new leap forwards — towards the organisation of a "party system" which no longer aims to mediate or represent conflicts in civil society, but is increasingly compact and counterpoised against movements in civil society, and against the political programme of the new composition of the class.

March 25, 2005 - 8:14am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

The Two Temporalities of Counter-Power and Anti-Power

John Holloway

1.

Time is central to any consideration of power and counter power or
anti-power. The traditional left is centred on waiting, on patience. The
social democratic parties tell us “Wait until the next election, then we
will come to power and things will be different” The Leninist parties say
“wait for the revolution, then we’ll take power and life will begin”. But we
cannot wait. Capitalism is destroying the world and we cannot be patient. We
cannot wait for the next long wave or the next revolutionary opportunity. We
cannot wait until the time is right. We must revolt now, we must live now.

March 24, 2005 - 11:55am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Peter Waterman writes:

"From ‘Decent Work’ to ‘The Liberation of Time from Work’:
Reflections on Work, Emancipation, Utopia and the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement"
Peter Waterman, Global Solidarity Dialogue Group

1. Introduction

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few." — P. B. Shelley, "The Mask of Anarchy," 1819.

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." — Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891.

"The Future Is Not What It Used To Be." — Cited Sousa Santos 1995:479.

I want to here comment on a number of historical and contemporary understandings of work and workers, represented in the quotations below. I want to comment more particularly on the utopian ones. Utopian ideas have always been central to or lain beneath emancipatory movements, particular labour and socialist ones in their emancipatory moments (Beilharz 1992). I want, even more specifically, to comment on this problematic in relation to the World Social Forum (WSF), or to the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement (GJ&SM) in general. Because, at least with the Forum, we are confronted with the problem of an event largely dominated by a position on work that is quite literally pro-capitalist, whilst so far providing little hearing for any specific utopian (post-capitalist) position on such.

March 23, 2005 - 10:36am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?"
Jacques Rancière

[From the South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004) pp. 297-310.]

As we know, the question raised by my title took on a new cogency during the last ten years of the twentieth century. The Rights of Man or Human Rights had just been rejuvenated in the seventies and eighties by the dissident movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—a rejuvenation that was all the more significant as the "formalism" of those rights had been one of the first targets of the young Marx, so that the collapse of the Soviet Empire could appear as their revenge. After this collapse, they would appear as the charter of the irresistible movement leading to a peaceful posthistorical world where global democracy would match the global market of liberal economy.

March 22, 2005 - 12:16pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Health

Anonymous Comrade writes "[from the occasional e-journal of scholar Paul Werner...]
WOID #XII-42. Viva la Muerte

Paul T Werner, New York
http://theorangepress.com

I)

The philosopher Hegel wrote of the ancient Egyptians: “The honor paid
to the dead [...] is not burial, but their perennial preservation as
corpses.” He might have been describing the “honor” paid to Terri
Schiavo by the US Congress. The poor woman’s been in a coma for
fifteen years, and thanks to the Republicans she’s on her way to
permanent mummyhood.

March 22, 2005 - 12:10pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Descriptions of the italian social centres are incredibly lacking in english. This is easily the best text that I've found, and unsurprisingly it was written by Steve Wright, elsewhere author of the essential "Storming Heaven, Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism".

‘A Love Born of Hate’


Autonomist Rap in Italy

Steve Wright
In less than a decade, home-grown rap has carved out its own space
within Italy’s music scene. Emerging at the end of the 1980s from the
local squatting movement and riding the crest of nation-wide university
occupations shortly thereafter, Italian rap has since gone on to win a wide
audience throughout the country. Today its influence is also apparent within
the mainstream of Italy’s pop industry, with prominent performers such as
Jovanotti doffing their caps not only to those first rap posses, but also to the
political movement of ‘self managed, occupied social centres’ (CSOAs)
which produced them (European Counter Network, 1998).

March 21, 2005 - 8:27am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Noam Chomsky, Still Furious at 76"

Alan Taylor, Sunday Herald, UK

On my way to meet Noam Chomsky in Boston, I pick up a copy of
The American Prospect, whose cover features snarling
caricatures of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, and of Chomsky:
the man dubbed by Bono 'the Elvis of academia'.

Cheney is
presented as the proverbial bull in an international china
shop, Chomsky is portrayed by this 'magazine of liberal
intelligence' as the epitome of high- minded dove-ish,
misguided idealism. Chomsky, of course, is well used to such
attacks. For every cloying article by a disciple, there is a
rocket from the enemy camp revelling in his perceived
failings and undermining his reputation, denigrating his
scholarship as a linguist and joyfully repeating statements
which, when taken out of context, seem tinged with
fanaticism.

Pages