Radical media, politics and culture.

Analysis & Polemic

"Notes on Another Defeat for U.S. Workers:

The Los Angeles Supermarket Strike of 2003-2004"

Loren Goldner

Media coverage was eclipsed by Hollywood’s Academy Awards, but on Sunday, Feb. 29, Southern California supermarket workers voted 86% to end their five-month old strike, accepting a contract that amounts to a serious, if not total, victory for a determined employer offensive with national implications.Thus one of the most important strikes in the U.S. in years has ended in defeat.

"Notes on the State of Networking"

Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider, February 2004

No longer the society, the political party or even the movement, networks
are the emerging form of organization of our time. By marching through the
institutions the idea of networking has lost its mysterious and subversive
character. Sandpapered by legions of consultants, supervisors, and
sociologists, as a buzzword networking superseded the latest fashions of
sustainability, outsourcing, and lean organization.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Floss and the Crisis: Foreigner in a Free Land?" 1
Martin Hardie *

Published in the Sarai Reader 4
http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader4.html

“... capitalism (or any other name that one wants to give to the process that today dominates world history) was not only directed toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Hericlitus's fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of the expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of the common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it." 2

"France: United Radical Left Campaign Gathers Momentum"

Murray Smith, Paris, Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004

The united campaign being waged by France's two largest revolutionary
socialist parties — the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) and Workers
Struggle (LO) — for the March 21 regional elections is getting a good
reception.

Morpheus writes:

"Historic Roots of the Haitian Civil War"
Morpheus


The present civil war has brought Haiti back into the news again, along with its many problems that have afflicted the country for over a century. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and now is stricken with a civil war that threatens to bring about a humanitarian catastrophe. The civil war has also prompted the Bush administration to consider military intervention in Haiti. Haiti’s problems to a great extend are due to interventions by foreign powers, mainly France and the United States. Further interventions cannot fix Haiti’s problems; they are one of the main sources of its problems.

"An Enemy of the People"

John Chuckman

Ralph Nader has defined a perfect moral dilemma for thinking Americans.


He finds himself in a situation resembling that of Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen's drama, "An Enemy of the People." Dr. Stockmann discovered the municipal baths were contaminated, but good burghers worried about the destructive effects of the truth on the town did not want the doctor revealing it.

rob eshelman writes:


"Meet the Shia... They Could Make or Break the Future of Iraq"
Rob Eshelman


In Baghdad’s upscale al-Mansour neighborhood, change is afoot. The towering pillars of a massive, but yet incomplete, mosque are visible from all around. The grey concrete supports stretching high into the smoggy haze of the Iraqi capital will eventually be topped by ninety-nine domes, making this the world’s largest mosque. Inside the unfinished, skeletal structure, posters of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, slain by Saddam in 1998, have been haphazardly stuck to the concrete walls by members of the numerous Shia families who now live on the grounds of the building zone.

"A Comment on the Question of Human Rights"

Alain Badiou

[During August and September, Christoph Cox and Molly
Whalen interviewed the French philosopher Alain Badiou
for Cabinet magazine. Shortly before the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cox and
Whalen asked Badiou to clarify his conception of human
rights. Shortly after the attacks, Badiou offered the
following response.]

Take the nearest example: the terrible criminal attack
in New York, with its thousands of casualties. If you
reason in terms of the morality of human rights, you
say, with President Bush: "These are terrorist
criminals. This is a struggle of Good against Evil."
But are Bush's policies, in Palestine or Iraq for
example, really Good? And, in saying that these people
are Evil, or that they don't respect human rights, do
we understand anything about the mindset of those who
killed themselves with their bombs? Isn't there a lot
of despair and violence in the world caused by the
fact that the politics of western powers, and of the
American government in particular, are utterly
destitute of ingenuity and value? In the face of
crimes, terrible crimes, we should think and act
according to concrete political truths, rather than be
guided by the stereotypes of any sort of morality.

"Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism"

Slavoj Zizek

It is as if we are witnessing today the ultimate
confirmation of Freud's thesis, from Civilization and
its Discontents,
on how, after every assertion of
Eros, Thanatos reasserts itself with a vengeance. At
the very moment when, according to the predominant
liberal ideology, we are finally leaving behind the
"immature" political passions (the regime of the
"political": class struggle and other "out-dated"
divisive antagonisms) for the post-ideological
"mature" pragmatic universe of rational administration
and negotiated consensus, for the universe, free of
utopian impulses, in which the dispassionate
administration of social affairs goes hand in hand
with the aestheticized hedonism (the pluralism of
"ways of life"), -- at this very moment, the foreclosed
political is celebrating a triumphant comeback in its
most archaic form of pure, undistilled racist hatred
of the Other which renders the rational tolerant
attitude utterly impotent.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"... nabbed from Groklaw.... the original from Groklaw contains some other acknowledgements to those who produced the transcript. You canj find it (and 422 comments!) here.

Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech: A Transcript

Contributed by: PJ

[If accuracy is vital, do check with the Harvard video. If you wish to hear the talk to verify it or just to enjoy it, here it is. I am continuing to edit, so if you see any errors, can you please help me out by letting me know? I just didn't want you to have to wait for perfection on my part, as that might be a long wait indeed.

Moglen makes reference to two legal terms, dicta and holding, which I'll explain briefly, so you can follow his thought. Dicta, the plural of dictum, is, according to my law dictionary, "a statement, remark, or observation in a judicial opinion not necessary for the decision of the case. Dictum differs from the holding in that it is not binding on the courts in subsequent cases." You can extrapolate holding's meaning from the definition of dicta. So, with that introduction, here is the transcript.

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