Radical media, politics and culture.

Analysis & Polemic

February 12, 2004 - 12:51pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Other sections:
Part 1
Part 3 (Notes)


Part II


Hunting the Machines

Every month brought news of an increase in sabotage
despite minimal coverage in either mainstream or radical press, not least because
communiqués were rarely sent. Sabotage largely centred around projects
where ongoing daytime campaigns were underway, but some was done in solidarity
with campaigns further afield. With so many groups fighting multiple schemes
by the same companies actions often ended fulfilling both roles. ARC, for instance,
had supplied roadstone to Twyford Down and was trying to expand quarries in
North Wales and Somerset.

February 12, 2004 - 12:41pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

British magazine/review "Do or Die" has been a key forum for writing and debate in the english language circles for many years. Born out of Earth First and the struggles against road construction in the early 1990s, this was the same milieu who began Reclaim the Streets and generally mixed themselves up in any mischief that was available. In their most recent issue they announced that this was the end of the road. The publication is well worth getting a copy of not least for the end of an era which it documents. This issue opens with a long narrative review of the ten years which made the writers what they are and which I'd encourage everyone to read.


Part 1 ::::
Part 2
::::
Part 3

Recent Pre-History


An Insurgency of Dreams

"Defend the Collective Imagination.
Beneath the cobblestones, the beach"

- Slogan daubed in Paris, May 1968

The radical ecological movement was born from the world-wide revolutionary
upsurge of the 1960s and '70s. Love of the earth and for each other has always
been with us, but in that period these feelings exploded across the world in
a way they hadn't for decades. In nearly every land people came together and
resisted. In some areas there were decisive victories for people in the battle
against power; in others, power won hands down.

The epic struggle of the Vietnamese people and the anti-Vietnam war actions
across the world; urban guerrillas across Europe; barricades in Paris; the
European squatting movement, the brutal end of the Prague Spring; the rise
of the Black Power movement.

February 11, 2004 - 2:54pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Coexistence with Islamic Fundamentalism?"

George Katsiaficas

To my great fortune, I am not now in the US. I am
fortunate not because I fear anthrax or other terrors
but rather because my mind and soul are not being
inalterably stamped by the patriotic media onslaught
and chauvinism swirling through the country with
greater strength than a tornado. During the last such
nationalistic maelstrom (the Iran hostage crisis in
1979) I was also lucky enough to have been living
abroad. I mention my location because my
perspective -- worlds apart from the vast majority of
Americans -- will probably seem quite un-American.

February 11, 2004 - 2:35pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"'Action Will Be Taken':

Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents"

Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti


[For the debut issue of Radical Society]

"We can't get bogged down in analysis," one activist told us at an anti-war rally in New York last fall, spitting out that last word like a hairball. He could have relaxed his vigilance. This event deftly avoided such bogs, loudly opposing the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan without offering any credible ideas about it (we're not counting the notion that the entire escapade was driven by Unocal and Lockheed Martin, the "analysis" advanced by many speakers). But the moment called for doing something more than brandishing the exact same signs -- "Stop the Bombing" and "No War for Oil" -- that activists poked skywards during the Gulf War. This latest war called for some thinking, and few were doing much of that.

February 11, 2004 - 2:30pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"Evil Eye"

Hakim Bey

The Evil Eye -- mal occhio -- truly exists, & modern western culture has so
deeply repressed all knowledge of it that its effects overwhelm us -- & are
mistaken for something else entirely. Thus it is free to operate unchecked,
convulsing society in a paroxysm of Invidia. Invidious Envy -- the active
manifestation of passive resentment -- projected outward thru the gaze (i.e.
thru the whole language of gestures & physiognomy, to which most moderns
are deaf, or rather which they are not aware of hearing).

February 9, 2004 - 12:48pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Independent Media

nolympics writes, This is from Counterpunch

Offending Valerie

Dealing with Jewish Self-Absorption

By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON

It’s most challenging to go where the silence is and say something.
Amy Goodman

I was kidding a couple of Muslim Palestinian-American friends the other day about being barbarians, by the lights of Israeli historian Benny Morris. This was a day or two after this paragon of dispassionate Israeli scholarship had expostulated in an interview published in Ha’aretz on the benefits (if you’re Jewish) of ethnic cleansing, the critical miscalculation of David Ben-Gurion in not having completed the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River in 1948 when he had a chance, and the barbarity of Arab and Muslim culture. “The Arab world as it is today is barbarian,” Morris declared. Islamic and Arab culture is “a world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West,” in which freedom and democracy are alien, in which there are “no moral inhibitions.” He was speaking in sweeping terms, of entire cultures, of the mass of individuals in the Arab and the Muslim worlds, not merely of governments that are oppressive or undemocratic. Palestinians in particular, Morris believes, are barbaric, “a very sick society,” and should be treated “the way we treat individuals who are serial killers. . . . Something like a cage has to be built for them.”

February 9, 2004 - 9:21am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Anarchism and Poststructuralism"


Paul Nursey-Bray

"Conventional anarchism relies too heavily upon
categories that are politically and epistemologically
suspect. These include scientific discourse, humanism
and rationalist semiotics. As long as anarchists
continue to employ this suspect thinking it is
extremely unlikely that they will be able to develop a
revolutionary theory or praxis that will provice
meaningful challenges either to capitalism or the
state apparatus that sanctions that economic system". -- Lewis Call

There have been a number of attempts in recent year to
achieve a meld of anarchism and poststructuralism.
These attempts have been based on perceived
similarities between the two bodies of theory,
particularly with respect to the iconoclastic approach
of anarchism to the state, authority and accepted
norms, and its proposal, as an alternative to
centralised power, of diffused networks of local
empowerment.

February 9, 2004 - 8:42am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Bombs and Bytes"

Anustup Basu, metamute

Fascism without a Fuhrer? During the build up of support for the war
on Iraq, no functionary of the US government publically stated that
Saddam Hussein had an active role in the devastation of September 11,
2001. Nevertheless, an alarming number of Americans believed that the
Iraqi despot was involved in the conspiracy and its execution.
Anustup Basu looks beyond the big lie, to show how information itself
short-circuits knowledge.

INTRODUCTION

During the publicity drive towards building up domestic and international
support for the 2003 war on Iraq, no functionary of the United States
government actually made a public statement to the effect that Saddam Hussein
had an active part to play in the devastation of September 11, 2001.
Nevertheless, it was subsequently noted in the opinion polls that an alarming
number of American people believed that the Iraqi despot was involved in the
conspiracy and its execution. Hence the two propositions -– Saddam the evil
one, and 9/11, the horrible crime -– seem to be associated in a demographic
intelligence without having any narrative obligation to each other; that is,
without being part of the same ‘story’. The outcome, it seems, was achieved by
a mathematical chain of chance, by which two disparate postulates, in being
publicised with adequate proximity, frequency, and density, gravitate towards
each other in an inhuman plane of massified thought. They, in other words, are
bits and bytes of newspeak which have come to share what I will call
an ‘informatic’ affinity with each other, without being organically conjoined
by constitutive knowledge. The formation of the latter entity is of course
something we are prone to consider a primary task of the philosophical human
subject, who is also the modern citizen with rights and responsibilities.

February 6, 2004 - 8:42am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

john stanton writes

"The End of Freedom"

John Stanton

“The compulsion of total terror on one side, which, with its iron band, presses masses of isolated [people] together and supports them in a world which has become a wilderness for them -- and the self-coercive force of logical deduction on the other which prepares each individual in [their] lonely isolation against all others -- corresponds to each other and needs each other in order to keep the terror-ruled movement in motion and keep it moving. Just as terror…ruins all relationships with men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when [people] have lost contact with [other people] as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, [people] lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced [follower], but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exist.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The American nation-state led by the Bush Administration, and the transnational rebel group led by Bin Laden, has brought to life the artificially fabricated insanity that Hannah Arendt so dreaded. But the situation is far worse than she could have imagined. The insanity that permeates the psyche of the United States of America and the mysterious Al Qaeda is being carefully nurtured by Bush and Bin Laden, the products of wealthy families intertwined in business dealings for decades. Rather than trying to find a mid-point where some commonality and reduction of violence might be found, these two zealots and their minions have eliminated the possibility of any peaceful outcome and, instead, daily sow the seeds of destruction for the causes they claim to promote. In short, perpetual ideological conflict played out on the battlefields of the world.

February 3, 2004 - 2:09pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

hydrarchist writes "It's amazing just how little literature there is in circulation about Italy's scoail centres, a massive movement for the reclamation of urbanm space in action since the 1970s. Steve Wright's piece is from 2001 and is only an introduction, but hopefully over the next months this lacuna can be filled. Elsewhere Wight is the author of Storming Heaven an excellent account of the development of 'operaismo' (a movement of social criticism that placed the grassroots insurgency of labour at the center of history). You can read Sergio Bolona's review of it here, and another by Aufheben here

Italy’s Social Centres — ‘A Thousand Human Stories’


Steve Wright


If some form of radical working class politics continues to exist in Italy today, part of the credit must go to those who run that country’s self-managed occupied social centres (CSOA). As Steve Wright explains, the very growth of the centres has brought new and as yet unresolved problems of its own.

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