Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Zapatistas: The Second Stage"

Immanuel Wallerstein

When NAFTA came into effect in January of 1994, the Zapatistas — a group
representing the indigenous Mayans in Mexico — revolted in Chiapas, one of
the poorest regions in the country, and drew attention to their right to
autonomy. For the last 11 years, the Zapatista rebellion has reinvigorated
anti-systemic movements around the world. The protests at the 1999 WTO
meetings in Seattle, as well as similar demonstrations in Genoa, Quebec
City, and Gleneagles, were in no small measure inspired by the Zapatistas.
Last month, however, the Zapatistas declared that their struggle had entered
a new phase, one that would be political and inclusive, but not military.
Similar to the actions of 1994, this declaration, says Immanuel Wallerstein,
seems once again to be the barometer of an international shift in sentiment.
Although the details have yet to be revealed, the author implies that this
new initiative could be the inspiration for a similar reevaluation
throughout similar movements around the world.

Since 1994, the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas has been the most important
social movement in the world — the barometer and the igniter of antisystemic
movements around the world. How can it be that a small movement of Mayan
Indians in one of the poorest regions of Mexico can play such a major role?
To answer that, we have to take the story of the antisystemic movements in
the world-system back to 1945.

From 1945 to the mid-1960's at least, the antisystemic movements (or Old
Left) — the Communist parties, the Social-Democratic parties, the national
liberation movements — were on the rise throughout the world, and came to
power in a very large gamut of states. They were riding high. But just as
they seemed to be on the cusp of universal triumph, they ran into two
roadblocks — the world revolution of 1968, and the revival of the world
right.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality"
Polygraph 18

Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics, is seeking submissions for its next issue, "Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality."

Call for Papers

Contemporary accounts of politics often coincide with strategies, theories, and experiences of temporality, whether they be historical periodizations, the experience of everyday life, or attempts to give figural or concrete form to such experiences through narration. If we understand narrative as the principal and necessary means through which one is able to make sense of time and temporal experience (and therefore also social change), we must recognize the centrality of narrative to any attempt to think politically; if we reject this claim, we must account for one's ability to make sense of lived experience in some other way.

Beyond this dilemma, however, we must acknowledge the prevalence of narrative as a means for understanding life (everyday or otherwise), causality, and political action, not only in the abstract, but in relation to specific forms of narrative and the different experiences of temporality they engender.

"Communique From the SI Concerning Vaneigem"

Guy Debord

Part 2 [Continued from here]

This permanent refusal to envision a real historical development, which was the product of his awareness and his acceptance of a relative personal incapacity (which thus increased), was accompanied — as was normal with Vaniegem — by an enthusiastic insistence on a caricature of the totality, in the revolution as in the SI, on the magic fusion, one day, of a spontaneity finally liberated (for the masses and for Vaneigem personally) with coherence: in such a wedding of identifications, the vulgar problems of real society and real revolution would be instantaneously abolished even before one had the displeasure of considering them, which is obviously an amiable perspective for the philosophy of history at the end of a banquet.

Vaneigem handled the concept of the qualitative by the ton, but resolutely forget what Hegel, in The Science of Logic, called "the most profound and most essential quality," which is contradiction. "In relating to it, actually, identity is only the determination of what is simple and immediate, of what is dead, insofar as contradiction is the source of all movement, of all life. This is only to the extent that a thing includes within itself a contradiction that shows itself to be active and alive."

Vaneigem, except at the beginning, didn't love the life of the SI, but loved its dead image, which was a glorious alibi for his mediocre life and a totally abstract hope for the future. Seeing that Vaneigem was quite comfortably accomodated to such a phantom, one understands how he could totally disperse it with a single breath, exactly on 14 November 1970, when it became necessary for him to begin to express his dissatisfaction, because taking the side of satisfied silence was no longer sustainable.