Radical media, politics and culture.

sgb writes:

"The Right to Escape"
Sandro Mezzadra


Escape, as a political category, has always been suspicious. It seems to have close connections with betrayal, opportunism and cowardice, all categories that are both antipatriotic and foreign to the traditional virtues of political action. However, desertion, as a figure of civil disobedience, has had some success in the peace and environmental movements since the 1970s; and the massive exodus from the former German Democratic Republic that marked the end of Real Socialism was certainly a political movement.

"Kerry Won"

Greg Palast

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided — known as “spoilage” in election jargon — because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.

Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

"Election 2004: 'Sour Grapes' or Voter Fraud?"

Mike Whitney



If you believe that George Bush won last nights election "fair and
square" then forget about reading this article. If you know however
that tens of thousands of people who lined up for up to four hours at
a time in Ohio and Florida to have their vote counted, were not
standing there to endorse the aggression and suicidal policies of the
current administration then read on.


The unprecedented high turnout coupled with new registrations (that
were overwhelmingly in favor of John Kerry) suggest that there was
foul play at the voting booths. As a result, consumer investigator and
activist Bev Harris (founder of Black Box Voting) "is conducting the
largest Freedom of Information action in history. On election night,
Black Box Voting blanketed the US with the first in a series of public
records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents
from 3,000 individual counties and townships."


If the Bush people are so confident in their victory let them "put up
or shut up."

Hex writes:

"Multitude and Empire, Civil War Everywhere:
Towards a Communist Response"

Sphinx

"For months the leading weekly and daily papers of
the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil
War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend
themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the slave states of
the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which
they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks
on the North." — Karl Marx, "The North American Civil War"

Everyone seems to agree! The left, the neo-Nazis, the isolationists, bringing
war to Iraq was a farce and a scam, a power-mad dash for resources that’s
just a mask for the mass murder of Iraqis and the schemes of the Neo-Conservative
cabal. Amid the fire and brimstone of the invasion, the Iraqi people are getting
nowhere, and the occupiers are clearly the oppressors in the situation. While
few would actually claim affinity with the tyrannous Saddam Hussein, opposition
to the war and occupation are inherently legitimate because people
are dying
. The Iraqi resistance is an imperfect but just response
to the Coalition’s rapacious greed for oil and never mind the former
Ba’ath parties and Islamic fascists behind the curtains, full speed
ahead! The Iraqi puppet state should be drowned in blood and the cosmopolitan
capitalism of the west should retreat from the desert; each and every glorious
beheading, the murders of collaborators and police, the assault on parasitic
contractors, each and every resistance to occupation becomes justice because
the people should rule Iraq, not the corporations.

The TRiSTERO collective (comrades from greece) writes:

"Critique of the 'Antiglobalization Movement'"

Tristero Collective)


Here is a critique to the “antiglobalization movement” as it was expressed in Thessaloniki during the EU Summit of 2003; about anarchists and antiauthoritarians in particular. This is because we regard ourselves as a part of this radical part of the movement. We deposit, as well, our self-criticism to the way we acted during and after a year in the preparation process, the choices we made concerning alliances, the decisions we took at the very last moment of the big demonstration (on Saturday). What should be taken into consideration is that both the social condition and the movements’ composition in Greece are much different from these abroad (we mean Western Europe mainly).

"Marx, Hegel, Ricardo:
The 'Inverted World' in the Heart of the Critique of Political Economy"

Loren Goldner

[This article was written for Wildcat (Germany), #73.]

“Yet the way that surplus-value is transformed into the form of profit, by way of the rate of profit, is only a further extension of that inversion of subject and object which already occurs in the course of the production process itself…This inverted relationship necessarily gives rise, even in the simple relation of production itself, to a correspondingly inverted conception of the situation… It is, as one can study in the case of the Ricardian school, a completely inverted attempt to want to attempt the laws of the rate of profit as laws of the rate of surplus value, or vice versa.” — Marx, Capital, vol. III, London, 1981, p. 136. [Translation slightly modified. All Marx quotes from Capital are from the Fowkes and Fernbach translations; page references without quotes are from the German edition (vols. 23–25 of the Marx-Engels Werke). Quotes from Theories of Surplus Value are from the MEW, Berlin 1956-1975; my translation.]

In the past forty years, it has become easier to draw a sharp line between Ricardo’s and Marx’s theory of value and between Ricardo’s economics and Marx’s critique of political economy.


Ricardo was for Marx the “most advanced capitalist viewpoint” in political economy. Marx’s “sensuous transformative activity” is, in the "Theses on Feuerbach," the “active side developed by idealism”, and in particular by the other “most advanced capitalist viewpoint”, the work of G.F.W. Hegel (1770–1832).

"America Implodes"

Thiago Opperman

Well, what do people think? What are some readings of this? Somehow, it's
hard to believe that this was just a matter of there being indifference to
the options (turnout was the highest in forty years) and it's pretty
difficult to argue there was no difference between candidates. It's also
pretty difficult to say it doesn't matter.


So why is it that when faced with a rich kleptocratic lying swindler
fundamentalist and a rich technocratic opportunistic swindler aristocrat,
people chose the former? It's very hard not to gather the impression that
the American proles — the sprawlingly ugly, fat, lazy, contented, bigoted,
analphabetic, credulous, stupid, cruel, humourless wastes between the
Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada — really do prefer to have messianic,
one-eyed idiots as their rulers. But why? It's a question of serious import
to any class analysis with the slightest interest in the human material that
composes the lower class in the most advanced capitalist country.

"Democrats in End Time:

Republicans Gain Shattering Victory; Who to Blame This Time?"

Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch

The crusade that George Bush called for in 2001 against terrorism from abroad came to fruition yesterday in a more homely context as Christians flocked to the polls in stronger numbers than in 2000 to battle against such manifestations of post-modernity as gay marriage.

"Why Kerry Lost"

Doug Ireland, Z-Net

John Kerry has definitively lost the popular vote by some three and a half million votes. That makes an all-out lawyers’ war in Ohio devoid of moral force (and I doubt that in the end there’ll be one).


Kerry ran a tactical campaign, devoid of vision or explicable alternatives, utterly lacking in message discipline, and riddled with misjudgments--it was one of the most incompetently run presidential campaigns by a Democrat in my lifetime. In addition, the voters just didn't like the rich stiff--and, as I've often observed, Americans don't want a president thay can't like. (In the exit polls, 76% said the one candidate quality which mattered most in how they voted for president was "he cares about people like me," which is the way pollsters determine likeability).

Anonymous Comrade writes:

What Does “Victory in the War on Terror By Any Means Necessary” Really Mean?

British political commentator Jonathan Dimbleby has recently — in a high profile 2 hour documentary for British TV channel ITV (30th Oct and 1st Nov) and in a supporting article in the U.K. Observer (30th Oct) — made the increasingly-heard argument that winning a war on terrorism requires waging and winning a war against global poverty (which in turn requires waging and winning a war on biodiversity loss, soil degradation, global warming, and so on, but let us leave the environmentalist aspects out of it for now). I would like to respond here to two main points made by Dimbleby in his Observer article which can be summarized as follows:

Pages