Radical media, politics and culture.

"On Neoconservatives and Trotskyism"

Louis Proyect

Reviewing "Arguing the World": a movie about the journey from Marxism to neoconservatism


Joseph Dorman's "Arguing the World" is a documentary study of the careers of four celebrated Jewish intellectuals from immigrant working class families who went to City College in the 1930s. While one of them, Irving Howe, stayed more or less critical of American society, the other three -- Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell -- evolved from establishment liberalism in the 1950s to neoconservativism in the Reagan era. I use the word career advisedly in describing their paths. Perhaps the most honest account of what it meant to belong to this group is found in Norman Podhoretz's Making It, where he admits that what motivated each shift in his political or cultural affiliation was how it would it advance his career.

"NAFTA's Knife: Class Warfare Across the U.S.-Mexico
Border"

Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Reviewing David Bacon, The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border

(Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004), 348 pages, cloth $27.50.

I once heard a discussion about the first sentences of
books and those sentences that were among the most
famous and most powerful. The opening of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was among the
most popular. David Bacon's first sentence in chapter
one of his book must now rank among the most gripping:
'NAFTA repeatedly plunged a knife into José Castillo's
heart.'

Ezra Alexander writes:

"Thrashin' of Jesus The Christ"

Ezra Alexander,

Mel Gibson is an anti-Semitic asshole. Or... he's a genius...

First Jew shot you get is of slow-mo silver sheckels being thrown at a money grubbing, sniveling Judas by a pack of bloodthirsty Rabbi's.

Jesus gets the shit kicked out of him by the Temple guards and the Rabbi's want him to suffer... why? The movie doesn't give you a clue. (Score a point for Mel if his aim is to get people to read the Bible because I will now just to see what the fuck happened in the book) As for the non-stop shit kicking... the Bible reads that he got slapped. Once.

"Passion: Regular or Decaf?"

Slavoj Zizek, In These Times


Reviewing Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ"

Those who virulently criticized Mel Gibson's "The Passion" even before
its release seem unassailable: Are they not justified to worry that
the film, made by a fanatic Catholic known for occasional
anti-Semitic outbursts, may ignite anti-Semitic sentiments?

"Twilight of the Neocons:

Richard Perle Has Begun to Panic"

Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke

Reviewing An End to Evil by David Frum and Richard Perle, Random House, $25.95

Since 9/11 a cascade of books purveying instant analysis on the ramifications has hit the bookstores. A deep fault line runs between them. Those with "evil" or "jihad" in the title lie on one side of the divide; those with "empire" or "lies" are found on the other. Their mutually antagonistic readerships snarl at each other across the chasm. So it is with David Frum and Richard Perle's new book An End to Evil: What's Next in the War on Terrorism, in which they reinforce the thesis -- now usually described as neoconservative -- that American interests and values are best pursued with a maximum of military stick and minimum of negotiating carrot. It makes little difference whether the issue is Libya, Iran, or North Korea. The authors believe market-democracy is best delivered on the back of a Tomahawk missile.

Here Now Next: Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt
Therapy


Taylor Stoehr

Reviewed by William Hoynes

The libertarian impetus in modern times has often
taken somewhat peculiar ways of resisting and
countering domination and exploitation.
Psychotherapies provide some interesting examples,
often with striking parallels to earlier heresies
within mainstream religious contexts. Among the
dominant psychologies in mid-twentieth century America
were various behavior controls, usually of reductive
positivist cast and medical dressing, in which
authority figures psychomedically defined and
manipulatively treated "abnormalities" and other
deviations which included much primarily tabooed and
dissident. Leaving aside therapists as associate
jailers for psychiatric wards and military and other
totalitarian institutions, and "crisis" coping and
more overt psychopathologies which therapists mostly
tried to restrain, they were, in the language of half
a century ago, insistently enforcing "conformity" by
inculcating "adjustment." Therapy was often lessons in
subordination.

"Bakhtin as Anarchist"

Caryl Emerson

[An excerpt from "Bakhtin After the Boom: Pro and Contra," Journal of
European Studies,
March 2002 v32 i1 p3(24).]

[T]he question of Bakhtin's Russianness is highly contested, and in
closing I will touch only on two areas where I think he partakes of a recognizably
mainstream Russian tradition.


First, there is much in Bakhtin's thought that is anarchist. By which I mean:
if Bakhtin can dispense with an institution, an impersonal norm, a mechanical
causality, he will do so. For all his formal style as a professor and for all
the reverence with which he approached the culture of the past, he had a
powerful animosity against 'official life', 'officialese', lobbying for
hierarchical recognition, all of which he perceived as cowardly alienation
and
irresponsibility. This animus fed both his fondness for carnival and
sustained
him during his long years of not being read and not being heard.

An anonymous coward writes:

"Open Marxism?"

Tadzio Mueller

Reviewing Holloway, J., Change the World Without Taking Power,
London: Pluto Press 2002.


A spectre is haunting Marxism: the spectre of
anarchism. Anarchists, whether self-described or
called thus by the media, have been reaping most of
the publicity that the radical wing of the
globalisation-critical movement has been able to
generate, and Marxists are both excited and dismayed
by this. Excited, because for the first time in many
years there is a recognisable anti-capitalist protest
movement on the streets of advanced capitalist
countries; dismayed, because this relative resurgence
of anti-capitalist radicalism has not been accompanied
by a resurgence of Marxism.

"Did Somebody Say Slavoj?"

Carlos Pessoa

Reviewing Slavoj Zizek, Did somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion. London: Verso, 2002.


Slavoj Zizek has become known for writing on the 'postmodern condition' and its implication for a radical political project. Although Zizek's Lacanian analysis (with a Hegelian impulse) can intimidate certain readers, his comical and entertaining writing enables a reading of key contemporary political issues. Although taking a critical stand to postmodern thought, I would argue there are postmodern aspects in Zizek's work that in the end make it postmodern radical chic.

"Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory"

John-Michael Bodi, H-Net

Reviewing Marxism against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, Mike Cole, and Glenn Rikowski, eds.
Revised
edition. Lanham and New York: Lexington Books, 2002. x + 341 pp.
Notes, bibliography, index. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-7391-0345-8;
$34.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7391-0346-6.

It is always a uniquely rewarding experience to read current ideas
about philosophy and the human condition especially as they relate
to education as it is affected by capitalism. Most readers will
appreciate this book for its attempts to shed light on the evolution
of thought past postmodernism although the connections to education
are few.

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