Anonymous Comrade submits:

"On the Future of Radical Politics"

Saul Newman

In my undergraduate days at Sydney University, during
my brief flirtation with Trotskyism, I was always
struck by the sectarianism of its politics. The
Trotskyists, or the Socialist Workers Party as they
called themselves, consisted of all of about three
hardcore members (probably even fewer these days).
They routinely split, formed opposing factions and, in
the most vitriolic terms, accused each other of
revisionism, betraying the party line, perverting the
true message of Marxism, and other heinous offences.

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"Realer Than Real:

The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari"

Brian Massumi

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world,
Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of
postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent,
leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an
ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality
whatsoever. That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution
of signs of the real for the real. In hyperreality, signs no longer represent
or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer
only to other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the
phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions. But
postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them,
images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any
term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination. Faced with this
homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. We can only
gape in fascination. For the secret of the process is beyond our grasp.
Meaning has imploded. There is no longer any external model, but there is an
immanent one. To the syntagmatic surface of slippage there corresponds an
invisible paradigmatic dimension that creates those minimally differentiated
signs only in order for them to blur together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange
and circulation. Hidden in the images is a kind of genetic code responsible for
their generation. Meaning is out of reach and out of sight, but not be cause
it has receded into the distance. It is because the code has been miniaturized.
Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information
fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism. The generalized
digitality of the computerized society.

"Sex, Race and Class"

Selma James

There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.