Radical media, politics and culture.
November 14, 2004 - 5:00am -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Sex

Justin Gerber writes

This is an excerpt from my 14,000 word Manifesto at GayNation.INFO

GAY NATION

Love, Freedom, Democracy And Human Potential


Preamble

When I finished the emotional crusade of creating this Manifesto, which is based
on quite a few years of nightmarish experience, I was still unsure that the
united states is the best choice for the City on the Hill. City on the Hill
is a modification of a cult reference, to mean a state/country acting as a vanguard
base for planetary Anarchy and The Second Epoch of Homo Sapiens: The Real California
Dream. When I came out in the late 1970’s, in los angeles, there was a
magic ether. We were becoming supermen because we were coming out. I had Gay
license plates on my car. But I did not find any other supermen. The closet
was still the most popular self-destruction, closely associated with the most
pathetic supplication/capitulation to every fascism imaginable and beyond. And
it continues: “HIV stops with me” makes me wanna puke. We can only
escape the cesspool by reaching for the stars. The netherlands promises marriage
certificates for Faggots and Dykes. And the dutch promise to be pro-Gay in general.
But the pictures of amsterdam Gay pride that I saw were vapid and pathetic,
even by american standards. My part dutch grandmother from missouri could have
organized a more radical event. It seems that Party Capital of Europe is a euphemism
for Faggots Too Cowardly to Climb Out of the Sewer (Closet). Perhaps dutch faggots
do not measure up to challenging queen what’s-her-swastika. It is the
Anarchist responsibility of those nominally free to liberate those still in
chains. Freedom in the closet is a delusion. If you do not believe in yourself,
if your society does not follow your instinct and passion, then you are a slave.

November 12, 2004 - 8:44pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Independent Media

"The Optimism of Uncertainty"

Howard Zinn, ZNet


In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in
comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay
involved and seemingly happy?


I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we
should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The
metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any
chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of
changing the world.

November 12, 2004 - 8:01pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Prisons & Prisoners

"Guzman's Fist:

The Sendero's New Trial"

Gary Leupp, CounterPunch

He hadn't appeared in public in 12 years, this former professor and university provost, Marxist philosopher specializing in the thought of Kant, and Chairman of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP, popularly known as Sendero Luminoso or "the Shining Path"). From 1980 he had led what became the most powerful communist insurgency in the Western Hemisphere. By the time of his capture in 1992, U.S. intelligence analysts estimated that up to one-half of Peru was more in the hands of the Senderistas, fighting their Maoist People's War, than those of the Peruvian state. He was regarded by his followers as the "Fourth Sword" of Marxism, and by his foes and the mainstream press almost everywhere as a "terrorist" responsible for all 70,000 deaths in a long civil conflict. Abimael Guzman (aka Presidente Gonzalo) met the press and the people in a Lima courtroom November 5.

November 12, 2004 - 12:49pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"God Bless America"

John Chuckman

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." — Alexis de Tocqueville

The international view of Bush's election was nicely summed up by the reaction of a group of my students from China. I teach economics at university part-time, and many of my students are from China. Lest you think their judgment clouded by communist ideology, please note the many Chinese students studying in Canada come from that country's bright, hardworking business class in the so-called New Economic Zone. American visions of rabid communists in China are as uninformed as American visions of realities in most places. These are practical, sensible people.

November 12, 2004 - 12:40pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Four Times Falluja Equals?"

Mark LeVine, Left Turn

As American forces penetrate ever deeper and more destructively into the city of Falluja, each of the major players in this violent drama is engaged in a complex, constantly shifting calculus involving ways of turning events to their advantage. Of the many possible outcomes to the battle of Falluja, the four which seem most plausible follow, starting with the one that might be viewed most positively by the Bush administration. In sum, they offer us a grim picture of how the window of success has closed on American strategists in Iraq. Even the "best" outcomes below (from the administration's point of view) have lost the trappings of freedom and democracy that helped justify the invasion nineteen months ago.

November 12, 2004 - 12:18pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Communiqué of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq on:
The transgressions of groups of Islamic terrorism against people of Iraq
 
 Day after day the bloody hands of terrorist Islamic gangs are reaching to and destroying new aspects of life of the Iraqi society. Everyday they violate the civility of the society and stamp upon its secularity and all the gains in form of freedom, equality, prosperity and humanism achieved by the masses over decades. Everyday, we hear the news of crimes committed by Islamists which disgust and stun everybody for the amount of violence and wickedness embedded in the methodology use by their perpetrators.

November 12, 2004 - 11:31am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

The following is extracted from A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno, published last year by Semiotext(e).The text is in two parts, the second of which you can find here.


"Ten Theses on the Multitude

and Post-Fordist Capitalism"

Paolo Virno



I have attempted to describe the nature of contemporary production, socalled post-Fordism, on the basis of categories drawn from political philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. I
have done so not as a professional exercise, but because I am truly
convinced that, in order for it to be described clearly, the mode of
contemporary production demands this variety of analyses, this
breadth
of views. One cannot understand post-Fordism without having recourse
to a cluster of ethical-linguistic concepts. As is obvious, moreover,
this is where the matter of fact lies in the progressive
identification between poiesis and language, production and
communication.

November 12, 2004 - 11:27am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

[The first part of the Ten Thesis is here.]

"Ten Thesis on Post-Fordist Capitalism (Part II)"

Paolo Virno

6.8. Thesis 7

In Post-Fordism, the general
intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself
principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labor.

As was
already said on the second day of our seminar, Marx, without reserve,
equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal
productive force) with fixed capital, with the "objective scientific
capacity" inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted
the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general
intellect presents itself as living labor. It is necessary to analyze
post-Fordist production in order to support this criticism. In
so-called "second-generation independent labor," but also in the
operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the
Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the
connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted
within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself
in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually
acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is
played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which
cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the
reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect

includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination. ethical
propensities, mindsets, and "linguistic games." In contemporary labor
processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as
productive "machines," without having to adopt the form of a
mechanical body or of an electronic valve.

November 12, 2004 - 10:05am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Operaismo, Autonomia, Settantasette in
Translation: Then, Now, The Future" (1)


Steve Wright

Originally published in Strategies, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2003

Interest in the work of Antonio Negri is considerable these days, and can be
measured by a variety of means. For the past few years, the prestigious Italian
leftist daily Il manifesto has published the 30 most-searched-for terms within the
newspaper’s online edition. Of these, the word “Negri” ranked fifth in 1999, 14th
in 2000, ninth in 2001, 11th in 2002, and ninth again for the month of May 2003.(2)


Engagement with Negri’s work has also been on the rise in the English language
press, as reactions to the success of the book Empire (co-authored with Michael
Hardt) attest. Within the various circles active against global capital, interest in
Negri has also been marked, with his ideas concerning the changing nature of
the world capitalist system widely debated.

November 11, 2004 - 1:18pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"A Man and His People"

Uri Avnery

Wherever he may be buried when he passes away, the day will come when his remains will be reinterred by a free Palestinian government in the holy shrines in Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat is one of the generation of great leaders who arose after World War II. The stature of a leader is not simply determined by the size of his
achievements, but also by the size of the obstacles he had to overcome. In this respect, Arafat has no competitor in the world: no leader of our generation has been called upon to face such cruel tests and to cope with such adversities as he.

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