"A Virtual World is Possible:

From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes"

By Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider, nettime

I.


We start with the current strategy debates of the so-called
"anti-globalisation movement", the biggest emerging political force for
decades. In Part II we will look into strategies of critical new media
culture in the post-speculative phase after dotcommania. Four phases of
the global movement are becoming visible, all of which have distinct
political, artistic and aesthetic qualities.

hydrarchist writes:

"Secrecy and Publicity: Reactivating the Avant-Garde"

by Sven Lutticken

The last decade has seen an increasing use by young artists of strategies and forms derived from neo-avant-gardes—Fluxus, Conceptual or Performance art. This has called forth charges of plagiarism from an older generation of artists, who feel the young brats are getting credit for ‘things we did thirty years ago’, without acknowledging and sometimes—even worse—without knowing their predecessors’ work. Are these repetitions, then, the blind, dumb survivals of forms long past their prime? There are indeed young artists making neo-Conceptual or Fluxus-type work that seems an exasperatingly minuscule variation on what has been done before: creating ‘social works of art’ by cooking dinners or spending the night with strangers; taking ‘jobs’ in non-art professions.

While many such strategies bear an uncanny resemblance to activities in the sixties that were far more marginal, and far less commercially successful, the fact remains that the repetition of a given practice within a changed historical and cultural context has a different meaning and function. Theory has not found it easy to come to grips with this phenomenon, in part because we still find it difficult to think about history in terms of survivals and repetitions—as what Hal Foster has called a ‘continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts’. [1]

Marxism and the American Worker

A special issue of Historical Materialism

Call for Papers

"America never stood still for Marx and Engels" (Irving Howe).

In 2003 Historical Materialism will publish a special issue, Marxism and
the American Worker. The centrepiece will be the first English translation,
by Daniel Gaido of Haifa University, of the long essay "The American Worker"
by Karl Kautsky. First published in 1906, in Die Neue Zeit, Kautsky was
responding to Sombart's famous book Why Is There No Socialism in the United
States? The special issue will also include critical analyses of ongoing
efforts within the Marxist tradition throughout the 20th century to come to
terms with this question, a debate reignited by the publication in 2000 of
It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, by Seymour
Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. In essays and reviews which range across
questions of the development of US capitalism, processes of class formation
and struggle, cultural politics, race and racism, gender relations, and
aspects of intellectual history, contributors to the special issue include
Johanna Brenner, Malik Miah, Kim Moody, Alan Wald, Paul Le Blanc, Michael
Goldfield, Robbie Lieberman, Charles Post, Dean Robinson, Boy Luethje,
Gerald Friedman, Loren Goldner and Bryan Palmer.

We invite submissions, of between 4000 and 7000 words, on any of these
themes. We are especially interested in receiving empirically grounded
Marxist analyses of the contemporary US working class and the contemporary
forms of its class struggle. We also would like to receive submissions
assessing the work of CLR James which sought to come to terms with American
civilisation.

Enquiries and submissions should be sent to the issue editor, Alan Johnson,
at johnson

Historical Materialism is a journal of critical research in Marxist theory
published quarterly by Brill Academic Press.