Radical media, politics and culture.

Reviews

A Secessionist Bibliography

1. Bryan, Frank and Bill Mares. Out! The Vermont Secession Book. Shelburne, VT: New England Press, 1987.


2. Bryan, Frank and John McClaughry. The Vermont Papers. White River Jct., VT: Chelsea Green, 1989.


3. Buchanan, Allen. Secession. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991.


4. Camus, Albert. The Rebel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.


5. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln. Roseville, CA: Prima
Publishing, 2002.


6. Gordon, David (editor). Secession, State & Liberty. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998.


7. Graham, John Remington. A Constitutional History of Secession.
Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2002.


8. Jacobs, Jane. The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the
Struggle over Sovereignty.
New York: Random House, 1980.


9. Kennan, George. Around the Cragged Hill. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1993, pp. 142-156.


10. Kohr, Leopold. The Breakdown of Nations. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1957.


11. Livingston, Donald W. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.


12. Naylor, Thomas H. Rebel. Unpublished manuscript, 2004.


13. Naylor, Thomas H. The Vermont Manifesto. Philadelphia, PA:
Xlibris, 2003.


14. Naylor, Thomas H. and William H. Willimon. Downsizing the
U.S.A.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1997.


15. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Human Scale. New York: Coward, McCann, &
Geoghegan, 1980.


16. Schumacher, E.F. Small Is Beautiful. New York: Harper & Row,
1973.

Uri Gordon writes:

"The World Is Made Up of Stories, Not Atoms"

Uri Gordon, Perspectives on Anarchist Studies 8:2

Reviewing:

We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism
Edited by Notes from Nowhere
(London/New York: Verso, 2003).

One No, Many Yesses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement
Paul Kingsnorth

(London: Free Press, 2003).

Since the best-seller success of No Logo, the non-fiction market has seen a veritable torrent of books about "The Movement." Fascinated with the first wave of grassroots resistance to present a truly global face in real-time rather than in retrospect, scores of journalists, academics, commentators, and self-appointed "leaders" have taken a stab at publishing their own accounts and analyses. Thus, faced with the present publications, one might naturally want to ask: "Do we really need another two books about global anti-capitalism?" In these instances, the answer is perfectly clear: given the combination of inspiring text, poster-perfect photography, and inclusive anti-authoritarianism, it would be hard to get enough of them.

"The Micro-Physics of Theoretical Production and Border Crossings"
Angela Mitropoulos


Reviewing:
Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Pre-history of the Present
(New York: SUNY Press, 2003)

"The encounter between the flows of money and those who have nothing but their labour power to sell is constitutive of and constituted by new desires, new habits and new subjectivities." — Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital

1. If for Althusser it seemed necessary to read "to the letter" — by which he did not mean a kind of punctilious scholasticism but alertness to both overt meanings and hesitations — it was just as important to declare what sort of reading one is guilty of. This is as much a review of a book that brilliantly puts that approach to work reading a number of theorists as it is a reading with regard for particular struggles and debates. What interests me here, given that I share the theoretical perspectives which inform The Micro-Politics of Capital, are what I see as the more troublesome details of those perspectives as they are brought to bear on political practices, specifically recent struggles around border policing and the writing of them.

"Witches of the 'First International'"
Steven Colatrella

Reviewing Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch:
Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation

[Autonomedia, 2004]

During the 16th and 17th century, hundreds of thousands of women were burned as witches across Europe. This holocaust, unprecedented in the history of any society before or since, is at the center of this brilliant new book by Silvia Federici, an early opponent of the IMF's role in Third World countries and veteran feminist theorist. This book is the most important new work on the origins of capitalism to appear in thirty years, since Immanual Wallerstein's The Modern World System. For activists today, Caliban and the Witch is more relevant and useful to our anticapitalist struggles and movements. For the inspiration for the book came from the author's years in Nigeria where she witnessed and participated in struggles against IMF and World Bank structural adjustment and privatization of land and resources. The book is part and parcel of the anticapitalist globalization movement (or global justice movement) and links the struggles at the dawn of the capitalist era with those in Chiapas, in Bolivia, in the oil fields of southern Nigeria, in the forests of Indonesia, against privatization of communally owned land and wealth.


Anthony McIntyre


Reviewing:
Moody
By Wensley Clarkson
The Blanket

When Gerard Tuite escaped in 1980 from Brixton prison it was a fillip for morale in the H Blocks. Seven men had passed the fifty-day stage of their hunger strike for political status and an end of some sort was imminent. Although Tuite was accompanied on the escape by two other remand prisoners, for the population of the H-Blocks Tuite's was the only name we cared for. He was the sole IRA escapee. The names of the other two men meant absolutely nothing to us. So concerned were we in the contentious crucible of the prison to assert our distinctive political motivation some in our number even wondered what Tuite was doing escaping alongside hoods. Most just envied him and hoped he would evade the security dragnet that would inevitably seek to pull him back inside.

"All Nietzscheans Now?"

John Moore

Reviewing:

Nitezsche Contra Rosseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought

Keith Ansell-Pearson

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Why We Are Not Nietzscheans

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, eds.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

Stanley Rosen

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

In his rancorous polemic Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, Murray Bookchin rightly identifies Nietzsche as one of the major influences on some of the most vital anarchist thinking of our day, even though Bookchin libels this thought with the grab bag label of ‘lifestylism.’ This fact in itself should indicate that Nietzsche is worth investigation from an anarchist perspective. Unfortunately, the three titles under review here add relatively little to such a perspective. Many interpreters of Nietzsche — Bookchin is a good example — nostalgically try to locate an ideological coherence in the work of the German philosopher which is inappropriate in the case of an anti-systemic thinker. Lamentably, these three texts, to one degree or another, fall for this red herring.

"American Psyche"

Thomas Frank, New York Times

Reviewing:

The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America.

By John Sperling, Suzanne Helburn,
Samuel George, John Morris and Carl Hunt. Illustrated.

272 pp. PoliPoint Press. $39.95.

The Uncivil War: How a New Elite Is Destroying Our
Democracy.

By David Lebedoff.
191 pp. Taylor Trade
Publishing. $24.95.

Who We Are Now: The Changing Face of America in the
Twenty-First Century.
By Sam Roberts.
293 pp. Times
Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $27.50.

Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has
Failed.
By Sherrod Brown.
228 pp. The New Press.
$24.95.

That we are a nation divided is an almost universal
lament of this bitter election year. However, the exact
property that divides us — elemental though it is said
to be — remains a matter of some controversy. One
thing is certain in the search to unravel the mystery
of the ''great divide'': we know for sure the answer
isn't class. We can rule that uncomfortable subject out
from the start.

"Chapter 39, Order 30:
Torture and Neo-Liberalism with Sycorax in Iraq"
Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch

Reviewing:
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
By Silvia Federici
Autonomedia 2004

The new U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, disregarded torture in his infamous, post 9/11 memorandum to Bush: "In my judgment, this new paradigm [the 'war on terrorism'] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

"Quaint," eh?

It might more aptly be applied to Magna Carta, the epitome of quaintness, though Professor Huntington of Harvard tells us in his screed to rid the nation of Hispanic cultural influence that the American creed, its cultural core, is Anglo, "going back to Magna Carta," which he thinks is somehow Protestant (Magna Carta 1215, Protestant Reformation 1517)! Furthermore, although it is such a quaint part of the Anglo core, it is not even written in English. Its most powerful part is chapter 39:

Nullus liber homo capiatur vel imprisonetur aut disseisietur de libero tenemento suo, vel libertatibus, vel liberis consuetudinibus suis, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum, vel per legem terræ.

Edward Coke provides the classic translation.

"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

"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.

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