jim submits:

"Between 'Historic Compromise' and Terrorism:

Reviewing the Experience of Italy in the 1970s"

Toni Negri, Le Monde Diplomatique, August-September, 1998

Translated by Ed Emery

[Toni Negri was one of the historic leadership of the Italian revolutionary group Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and is currently serving a prison sentence in Rebibbia prison, Rome. Negri gave himself up on 1 July 1997 after 14 years' exile in Paris in a bid to close a chapter in his own personal "judicial history" and that of other far-left militants still in exile. Originally sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment for "armed insurrection against the state" and to four and a half years for "moral responsibility" for the clashes between revolutionary activists and police in Milan between 1973 and 1977, he theoretically still has over four years to serve. Waiting for a general remission (indulto) from the Italian parliament which has not as yet materialised, he was authorised to work on day-release at the end of July. In the following article, he recalls the political experience of the 1970s in Italy.]

To speak of what the 1970s represented in Italy's political history is to speak also of the present. In part, because the consequences of the repressive policies of those years are still very much with us. The Special Laws have not been repealed, at least 200 people are still in prison and about the same number are living their lives in exile(1). Also, because the disintegration of the post-war political system, shattered to pieces by the fall of the Berlin Wall, had reached intolerable limits. But above all, because the social (and psychological) traumas of that decade have still not been healed or distanced.

Jason Adams writes:

"The Re-embedding of the War Machine:

Resistance to Mediation in Societies of Primary Orality and Primary Literacy"

By Jason Adams

"The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize -- the State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging or conquering the State?" -- Deleuze and Guattari, 1987

Introduction

In the course of "Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine," Deleuze and Guattari construct a theory about the mediation of everyday life, based on Clastres' argument that nomadic (oral, gatherer-hunter) societies are marked by the presence of a "war machine" at the core of their social being, which serves to ward off the emergence of the state-form. Thus the function of war in oral societies is not to win hegemony but rather "to assure the permanence of the dispersion, the parceling, the atomization of groups" which, as Deleuze and Guattari state, valorizes the smooth space of difference over and against the striated space of identity. These assertions are well supported by contemporary political anthropology; as I will show in this essay, Sahlins, Goody and others have demonstrated that the Paleolithic era was marked primarily by multiplicity and abundance; thus hegemony and scarcity were not, as is often stated, the norm for the majority of the species' lifespan prior to "civilization."

dr.woooo writes:

"Dissonance and Mutations: Theorising Counter-Culture"

David Eden

Could there be a more telling example? The (International) Noise Conspiracy an apparently revolutionary rock band from Sweden, made up of punks-come-mods, steeped in Situationist esqu rhetoric dancing on mainstream music programs in uber-stylish clothes singing "Everything is up for sale"? Is it the ultimate subversion, the recapturing and repositioning of dominant structures of the culture industry and turning them into opposition voices? Or is it the ultimate recuperation, the transformation of expression of alienation and revolt into niche commodities for expanding youth markets, the conversion of dissent into a spectacle of harmless dissent? Counter-culture( especially that based around "youth") is now a fundamental part of the life of global cyber-industrial civilisation. Often critiqued as a past time for middle-class children in Western nations, young ( and not so young) people all over the world participate in counter-culture on deep personal levels. Anecdotal evidence suggests Malaysia has a larger "death metal" scene than Australia.