Radical media, politics and culture.

Theory

April 2, 2003 - 10:39am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

dr.woooo writes:

"Intervention in the Vacuum"

By Chris Baden

Ever since the events of 1989-91, there has existed a historical vacuum. This vacuum has been filled by (depending on your world view) distinct descriptions such as End of History, Empire, Globalization. I am not so concerned over the correct definition of the current power structure, but I am concerned with how these power relations have shaped the current crisis in Iraq and what follows from there.

April 2, 2003 - 10:27am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

dr.woooo writes:
"The Same Old Empire (Oops, I mean Imperialism)...

by sasha k

Before September 11 2001, calling the US an Empire put one in the realm of the paranoid, the left or the academic, but now all that has changed. Everyone is using the word, both pro and con. It has been used so much that President Bush himself has had to respond:
"We have no territorial ambitions, we don't seek an empire," Bush remarked on Veterans Day, continuing, "Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others."

April 1, 2003 - 8:35pm -- Ben_Meyers
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes


Harvard cyber-law professor, James Moore, outlines the case for multitudinous emergent democracy in opposition to US hegemony; inspired, he dubs the movement The Second Superpower.

The point of the paper is that “the movement” is now approaching the status of “the second superpower,” after the United States. This is due to (1) critical mass of people who identify with the world rather than the nation, with each other rather than just themselves, (2) the web and interactive media “neurology” of the movement—including texting, email lists, and blogging—which is giving it a kind of collective mind and ability to act, and (3) the advance of international institutions and international law, which provides a venue or a forum in which the second superpower can work with sympathetic nations to press its cause. The Bush administration is attacking the fabric of the international system, but it is unlikely to prevail. Shades of Empire?"

March 28, 2003 - 11:09am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Jett writes   This essay deals with an issue central to contemporary international relations: the on-going transformation of sovereignty.

Sovereignty is a kind of authority; traditionally it has been conceived of as the indivisible monopoly power over social, political, and economic matters within discrete geographically defined and contained units (i.e. sovereign States); for example, the authority of a government to tax economic activity or to assert laws within "its" territory. The modern system of dividing the earth into sovereign territorial States arose out of feudal European socio-political theory, with the Peace of Westphalia treaties (1648) as the "coming-out" moment in which these theories were first substantially established as "international law". The concept of sovereignty has since developed in time with Western thought, and this system of political organization has spread throughout the earth, primarily through the colonial endeavors of European empire-builders.

March 28, 2003 - 10:23am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

jim writes:

René Riesel: From Situationism to the Farmers' Confederation, a Radical Thinker


Submission is Advancing at a Frightful Speed

Alain Léauthier

Libération (3-4 February 2001)

Translated by Tom McDonough



STILL FIGHTING

FORMER MEMBER of the Situationist International, 51-year-old René Riesel breeds sheep on the Méjean plateau in Lozère. At the age of 17 he belonged the Nanterre ?Enragés,? then to the Occupation Committee at the Odéon in May ?68. The ?situs? would recognize him as one of their own, the youngest and also the most promising of them according to Guy Debord, before expelling him like almost all the others.


The very image of the urban rebel, Riesel became one of the gray eminences of the Farmers? Confederation. Then, at variance with them, he left it in 1999. He did not, however, give up fighting.

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March 27, 2003 - 9:05am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes: "This screed just in from the SWP UK Theory Commisar... pretend they are not there?"

"Autonomism: Evading Power"

Alex Callinicos


Counterposed to reformism within the anti-capitalist movement is a position that is apparently its opposite, renouncing not only a reliance on the existing state, but the very objective of taking power from capital. This is the position taken by the autonomist wing of the movement whose most famous representatives are the Italian disobbedienti. This takes its inspiration from some of the remarks of the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. For instance, he writes, 'Perhaps, for example, the new political morality will be constructed in a new space that will not require the taking or retention of power but the counterweight and opposition that requires and obliges the power to "rule by obeying".'

March 26, 2003 - 5:43pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

We recently received this manuscript with the note: 'Dear friends. I know that you will appreciate this text. I trust you to do what you see fit, please excuse my English, publish it warts and all as you say in your language...' It was sent from a still Muslim country, and it begins:

The challenge of our times -- for us proletarians who live in countries where Islam is part and parcel of the status quo --, is to criticize this "religion of the desert", not for God's sake but for our very own. So that we don't have to worry anymore about anyone coming back from the dead to tell us if there is life after death. It seems more human to find out whether there is life before death. (1)




"The Misery of Islam:

An Iranian Situationist Critique of Religion"

Al-Djouhall


"When I was lying in my warm, damp bed these questions did not interest me one jot and at such a time it did not matter to me whether God really existed or whether He was nothing but a personification of the mighty ones of this world, invented for the greater glory of spiritual values and the easier spoliation of the lower orders, the pattern of earthly things being transferred from the sky. All I wanted to know was whether or not I was going to live through to the morning. In face of death, I felt that religion, faith, belief were feeble, childish things of which the best that could be said was that they provided a kind of recreatian for healthy, successful people..." "The Blind Owl,"Sadegh Hedayat
March 21, 2003 - 9:27am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes

"American Empire and the Emergence of a Global Ruling
Class"

Joe R. Golowka

Traditionally, the radical left has viewed international relations in
the past 50 years through a paradigm of the American empire.
The United States is viewed as the latest and most powerful
imperialist power, dominating over the rest of the globe. During
the cold war this was sometimes viewed as a dual-empire
scenario; with the American empire competing with the Soviet
empire.

March 20, 2003 - 8:37am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Practicing Anti-Capitalism"

An Interview with Brian Holmes



After the World-InfoCon conference in Amsterdam Brian Holmes, writer, art critic and translator told World-Information.Org (http://world-information.org/wio/readme/992006691 /1046966843) about his collaboration with the French artist group Bureau 'Études in mapping capitalist structures.

February 18, 2003 - 5:14am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

To the Vector the Spoils
McKenzie Wark interviewed by Roy Christopher
from frontwheeldrive.com

http://frontwheeldrive.com/mckenzie_wark.html


Roy Christopher: Let's get our terms aligned first:
How do you define the term 'hacker'? Do you
include artists, software developers and other so-
called 'knowledge workers'?


McKenzie Wark: I think everyone who actually
creates 'intellectual property' could consider
themselves part of the same class -- the hacker class
? and as having convergent interests. So, yes, that
could include programmers, musicians, writers, and
also engineers, chemists -- all sorts of people who
are culturally distinct. What we have in common is
that we have to sell the products of our intellectual
labor to corporations who have a monopoly on
realizing its value. We invent the idea, but they
control the means of production. The laws that
used to protect us ? copyright and patent -- have
been subtly changing over the course of the last
few decades to protect corporate owners of
existing 'intellectual property', not individual
creators of new ideas. And so I wrote 'A Hacker
Manifesto', to dramatize this emergent conflict.

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