Radical media, politics and culture.

From New Left Review


New Wave Argentine cinema—documentaries from the badlands, taxi boys on roller-skates, escrache protests—thriving after the crash of 2001, in the diary of an émigré practitioner.

Edgardo Cozarinsky


Monday 9th June

I left the long summer days of Paris for the Buenos Aires winter: it was zero degrees and the afternoons were over by five thirty. The Kirchner government had been installed in May, and even among the capital’s disillusioned, not to say cynical inhabitants, it was enjoying the obligatory honeymoon period. In the taxi from the airport, the driver asked me my opinion of the president’s first measures: a green light for the trial of corrupt Supreme Court judges, the sacking of dozens of high-ranking military officers, government subsidies for public works under the auspices of select workers’ organizations. I tried to explain to him that, having witnessed an array of more or less inefficient civilian governments and brutal military regimes, it was hard for me to have any illusions on this score, even if the outlook seemed quite positive. ‘We are just like you,’ he said, ‘waiting for the first foul-up.’


Majority of US Adults Expect to See "Fahrenheit 9/11"

David W. Moore, Gallup News Service


PRINCETON, NJ — According to the most recent Gallup survey, more
than half of all American adults (56%) either have seen or expect, at
some time, to see Michael Moore's controversial movie, Fahrenheit
9/11, a highly critical look at the Bush administration's decision to
fight a war in Iraq. The poll was conducted July 8-11. At the time,
8% of Americans said they have already seen the movie, 18% expected
to see it in the theater, and 30% expected to watch the video. Among
all Americans, more people have an unfavorable than favorable
impression of the movie, but those who have seen it are
overwhelmingly favorable.

"Maufacturing Dissent:

Think Before You Cheer — Michael Moore is Making a Noose for the Left's Neck"


Shlomo Svesnik, WW3Report.com

Who can resist the urge to cheer?

George W Bush has gotten away with stealing an election, waging an illegal
war of aggression, and redesigning the entire federal security and
intelligence apparatus, expanding its powers on a level not seen since the
dawn of the Cold War. A sniveling mediocrity who achieved the pinnacle of
global power entirely through family connections, he is leading the world
into a state of permanent war, turning the planet's lone superpower into a
despised and isolated pariah. All decent, thinking people want to see him
soundly trounced in November, and Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9-11 is
the most effective piece of anti-Bush propaganda to hit the American
mainstream, by a mile.

"The Weather Underground"

A Film by Sam Green and Bill Siegel

[Download it on Bit Torrent. See Fahrenheit 911 thread for more instructions.]

An Interview with Documentary Filmmaker, Sam Green
Alexander Laurence

"Hello, I'm going to read a declaration of a state of war... within the next 14 days we will attack a symbol or institution of American injustice." — Bernardine Dohrn

Thirty years ago a group of American radicals announced their intention to overthrow the U.S. government. In THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, former members, including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, David Gilbert and Brian Flanagan, speak publicly about the idealistic passion that drove them to "bring the war home." Outraged over racism and the Vietnam War, the Weather Underground bombed targets across the country that they considered emblematic. The group's carefully organized clandestine network managed to successfully evade one of the largest manhunts in FBI history.

Environment, Capitalism & Socialism

Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP)


The Australian Democratic Socialist Perspective's major work on the environment, originally published by Resistance Books in 1999, is now available online here.The Table of Contents is available below.

NOT BORED! writes:

"The Deception of Strategy"

Bill Not Bored


"We want them [the Iraqis] to quit, not to fight, so that you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes." -- Harlan Ullman, creator of the "Shock and Awe" tactic, January 2003.

"As we move toward a new Middle East, over the years and, I think, over the decades to come . . . we will make a lot of people very nervous. We want you [Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the leaders of Saudi Arabia] nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you -- the Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family -- most fear: We're on the side of your own people." -- ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, 3 April 2003.

Today, 25 June 2004, just five days before the US military is scheduled to "hand over" political control of Iraq to a provisional governing body, it became official: the Bush Administration has lost the support of the American people for its "humanitarian" war against Saddam Hussein. A public opinion poll conducted by CNN-USA Today-Gallup has found that a majority (54 percent) of the 1,005 Americans who responded think that going to war in the first place (no matter what the justification) was a mistake; they are increasingly disappointed with the results, which are appalling and grow worse every day. They are also increasingly disillusioned with George W. Bush, whose disapproval ratings are higher than they have ever been.

Will Michael Moore's Facts Check Out?

Philip Shenon, 2912db05cb9917f">New York Times

Michael Moore is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit
9/11," his blistering documentary attack on President Bush
and the war in Iraq. He wants it to be remembered as the
first big-audience, election-year film that helped unseat a
president.

Al Jazeera's "Control Room"

Ronda Hauben

The documentary "Control Room" [1] opened in NYC on Friday night May
21, 2004. The opening weekend shows were sold out, and the reviews in
the NY press encouraged people to see the film and to take it
seriously. On the surface, "Control Room" appears to be a film about
the Arab language media organization Al Jazeera and their coverage of
the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The actual focus of the film
is, however, considerably more profound.

"Move Over, Michael Moore!"

Sheelah Kolhatkar, NY Observer


Reviewing the film documentary "The Corporation"

In the soon-to-be-released documentary The Corporation, a commodities trader named Carlton Brown stares into the camera and describes his first reaction upon hearing that two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

"How much is gold up?" he wondered. "My God, gold must be exploding!" He explains that he and his clients went on to mint money as gold futures shot up and the buildings came down.

Craven attempts to capitalize on tragedy aside, corporations and those who operate them are destined to behave amorally because, well, that’s what they do, according to The Corporation, a film that won the World Cinema Documentary Audience award at Sundance and opens in New York on June 30. The filmmakers’ reasoning is simple: Corporations by their very nature are psychopathic.


Full story here.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"‘Marxing Read Ontologically?’
Jason Read’s Autonomist Post-Structuralism"
Senequetc.

[Reviewing Jason Read, The Micro-politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (State University of New York Press, 2003), and retrospectively of Jean Baudrillard, Le Miroir de la Production: ou l’illusion critique du matérialisme historique (Editions Galilée 1975).]

A l’instar de la valeur d’échange et de la marchandise, selon Marx, les formes abstraites apparaissent à travers des choses, comme propriétés des choses, en un mot naturalité. La forme sociale et la forme mentale semblent données dans un « monde ». — Henri Lefebvre, La Vie Quotidienne Dans La Monde Moderne

Quite at the beginning of his writing life, Jean Baudrillard has observed that a certain type of Marxist can only see the world of capital as a multiplication of self-moving social forms. This type of Marxism (which used to be more widespread than it is today), by grace of its limitations, is caught in these forms, rather than hacking a theoretical path through the jungle, following the lead of actual struggles.

In order to grasp the ontology of capital’s forms, i.e. their social being, Marx himself argued we have to descend into what he called the ‘hidden abode’ of production, and into (as Italian feminists have added) the ‘arcane’ of reproduction of labour power. Descending willfully down all these rickety staircases and ladders, sweeping away the dust and cobwebs of years, we find ourselves knocking on a door strangely well-oiled, to encounter an old figure: the worker, left in a place that remains even after history has "ended" — the workplace.

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