Radical media, politics and culture.
November 2, 2004 - 12:02pm -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

"Labour History as the History of Multitudes"

Marcel van der Linden, Multitudes

Reviewing:
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker,
The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Boston: Beacon Press 2000)

Labour hisorians study the working class to examine its development, composition, working conditions, lifestyle, culture, and many other aspects. But what exactly do we mean when we use the term "working class" ? Over the past half-century, the answer to this seemingly simple question has changed continuously.


In the 1950s and 1960s it usually denoted male breadwinners who earned a living in agriculture, industry, mining, or transport. In the 1970s and 1980s objections from feminists instigated a fundamental revision that broadened the focus beyond the male head of the household to include the wife and children. Occupational groups that tended to be overlooked in the past, such as domestic servants and prostitutes, started to receive serious consideration.


The chronological and geographic scope of the research expanded as well. Labour historians became interested in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and took a closer look at pre-industrial wage earners. Our overall perspective on the working class has undergone a paradigmatic revolution. The signs indicate that this first transition is merely a harbinger of a second one. 1

November 2, 2004 - 9:32am -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

"After the Empire"

Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education

Reviewing:

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin).

In 2000, Michael Hardt, an associate professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio Negri, a legendary figure on the Italian left, published a volume bearing the grand, stark title Empire. Even before it was listed in the Harvard University Press catalog, the appearance of the book was keenly anticipated among antiglobalization activists. Rumor had it that Empire would provide a definitive analysis of the new world order. It would be the theoretical bridge between postmodernist academics and a mass movement that was making it ever harder for international financial institutions to meet in peace.

November 1, 2004 - 8:50pm -- nolympics
Reviews
Culture

Days of Crime and Nights of Horror
Ramor Ryan

A review of:
Days of War, Nights of Love: CrimethInc for Beginners (CrimethInc Workers’ Collective, 2001).
Days and Nights of Love and War by Eduardo Galeano (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

A STORMY NIGHT….

The wild Pacific Ocean pounds the shore of the tiny Guatemalan port town of Champerico. Overrun by gangs and drugs, Champerico gets one line in the guidebook: sweltering, dilapidated, dangerous—best avoided. My kinda town. Here, among the ghosts of Guatemala’s terrible recent history and the tumultuous daily life of a lawless, desperado town as far removed from shopping mall America as can be imagined, is a good location to begin considering the two books in question.

November 1, 2004 - 8:50pm -- nolympics
Reviews
Culture

Days of Crime and Nights of Horror
Ramor Ryan
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Reviewing:
Days of War, Nights of Love: CrimethInc for Beginners (CrimethInc Workers’ Collective, 2001)
and
Days and Nights of Love and War by Eduardo Galeano (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

A STORMY NIGHT….

The wild Pacific Ocean pounds the shore of the tiny Guatemalan port town of Champerico. Overrun by gangs and drugs, Champerico gets one line in the guidebook: sweltering, dilapidated, dangerous—best avoided. My kinda town. Here, among the ghosts of Guatemala’s terrible recent history and the tumultuous daily life of a lawless, desperado town as far removed from shopping mall America as can be imagined, is a good location to begin considering the two books in question.

October 29, 2004 - 12:33pm -- nolympics
Reviews
Reviews

The Cannibis Companion
by Steven Wishnia
Running Press, 2004

If you haven’t been pinched for herbal indiscretions of late, you could be forgiven for thinking weed became legal long ago. With grandmothers smoking herb to ease glaucoma and a president with a predilection for the harder stuff (cocaine as a youth, Jesus in recent years), marijuana has never been more pervasive, less taboo or higher quality. So while teenagers across Brooklyn are still tucking bags beneath their tender scrotums, Indypendent contributor Steven Wishnia’s The Cannibus Companion offers “the ultimate guide to connoisseurship” in a tasteful, and tasty coffee-table book artfully designed to amuse your stoned-out brethren while they’re glued to the couch.

And, it’s educational too. Learn how racial paranoia fed into early prohibition efforts. Marvel bud porn so explicit the pages stick together. Ponder the difference between indica and sativa. Geek out over the technology of hydroponics. Enrich yourself with regional rolling techniques such as blunts and the exotic “European” spliff – mixed with tobacco to make it truly rebellious. And weep, weep I tell you, at the palty skinny on the “New York joint,” famous around the country for being so slim you can “pick your teeth.”

Which reminds me, something needs to be done about the crazy price of the smokables in this city. Reading chapters on how they roll “Texas-sized” down south, I can’t remember the last time I even saw a dime-bag. An eighth of hydro reportedly runs $70-$80. Community merchants blame the “war on terror,” with cops randomly searching at bridges and tunnels for Osama Bin Smokin, but I smell profiteering. If you can’t get lifted on a working man’s wage, then the terrorists are winning. And we wouldn’t want that.

October 28, 2004 - 12:24pm -- jim
Reviews
Mainstream Media

"How to Cross Borders, Social or Otherwise"

Elizabeth Bard, The New York Times


In the basement of the New Museum of Contemporary Art's temporary home in Chelsea, a seemingly ironic invitation appears on a black-and-white label next to a flat-screen computer:


"The Status Project aims to aid those who seek change, for example moving from homelessness to a career in bank management, or from the legal identity of a 32-year-old American woman to a male Pakistani teenager.''


This is not a joke. Or rather, it is a joke, but one with potentially serious consequences.


Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, two British artists, are compiling a database exploring elements of legal status in Britain, with the ultimate goal of allowing people to create a new identity from information collected on the Internet. The first stage of their project is the focus of "Rules of Crime,'' a small show that runs through Nov. 13 at the New Museum.

October 22, 2004 - 9:51am -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

Setting the Standard for the Study of the Russian
Revolution

Kevin J. Murphy

Reviewing Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power

Chicago: Haymarket Books, London: Pluto Press, 2004.

xxxiii + 394 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, selected
bibliography, index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-745-32269-7; $18.00 (paper), ISBN 0-745-32268-9.

Contemporary politics always have figured prominently
in framing the way historians approach the Russian
Revolution. The social movements of the 1960s inspired
a generation of historians to study history "from
below," in which they attempted to reconstruct the
actions and aspirations of those previously written out
of history. In no area did this new social history
produce a more thorough revision than in the contested
field of Russian studies. Over a course of a decade, a
small but extremely talented group of historians proved
beyond doubt what many on the Left had long argued —
that a massive popular uprising had ushered in the
transfer of power to the soviets in 1917.

October 21, 2004 - 11:27am -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

"Once Upon a Time…"

Jacques Depelchin

Reviewing Ayi Kwei Armah's
KMT: In the House of Life, An Epistemic Novel

[Jacques Depelchin, PhD, is
Executive Director of the Ota Benga International Alliance for Peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley]

The twenty four chapters of this novel are divided into three unequal parts. Part one (the scholars) starts with the narrator (Lindela) confessing to the contradiction she had lived through: on the one hand trying to run away from her mission in order to achieve peace of mind, and on the other hand, so to speak, the mission constantly presenting itself and calling on her to act. What had caused her to seek forgetfulness was the loss of her best friend while attending a school (White castle school) set up by well-meaning white colonizers to train future native leaders. Her dilemma is a familiar one: a witness of a crime who cannot help but respond to her conscience and speak the truth, whatever the cost.

October 21, 2004 - 9:02am -- jim
Reviews
Work

JJ, North Star (A) Collective, FRAC writes:

"Anarchist Review of the Million Worker March"


The Million Worker March is a new beginning for the anti-globalization, anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-sexist, pro-union, pro-environment and anti-state commons in the US (here on out it will just be called anti-capitalist movement). In the past few years we as a movement have consistently been on the defense. This can be seen when we threw up our resistance to the WTO in Seattle in 99, to the IMF protests in D.C. in 2000, to the Philadelphia protests in 2000, FTAA in Miami in 2003, and many other battles. The momentum was building for a genuine resistance movement but the movement was dealt a backlash on 9/11 and the state buckled down and put our many movements into remission.

October 18, 2004 - 11:56am -- jim
Reviews
Events

Ping Pong / Middlesex Declaration / dESFunctionality

Kernow Craig, Greenpepper Magazine

The events at the ESF around issues of precarity were interesting. I've
given a very brief overview of it all as I'm still a little fried by it
all, maybe others that attended can extrapolate on the following...


The initial events taking place within the official european social forum
on precarity was not attended by m/any of the non union groups organising
around this, leaving the 'official' discussions to what have been
described as the political undead. This event was largely seen by those
who withdrew as a photo opportunity for the italian unions to demonstrate
how they are putting this on the eurowide agenda.

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