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Analysis & Polemic

November 30, 2003 - 12:55pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"Questions about The New Imperialism:

An Interview with David Harvey

Nader Vossoughian, http://www.agglutinations.com


In his recently published The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), geographer and social theorist David Harvey makes the case for a "New Deal" brand of imperialism in which the responsibilities of government are carried out by a “benevolent… coalition of capitalist powers.”


Against foes of globalization, he argues that the effects of global capitalism are undoable, that advocates of social reform must learn to work within the framework of the marketplace. By the same token, he remains critical of American foreign policy, whose objectives, he argues, have been shaped to a large degree by the neo-liberalism of the moderate left (think US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin) and more recently by the neo-conservatism of the right (think US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld).


In the interview that follows, I ask Harvey to elaborate on his views, particularly on the point of how he distinguishes his vision from those articulated by peer intellectuals of the political left.

November 29, 2003 - 5:12pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

rob eshelman writes:

"Miami, Laboratory of Repression"
Writer’s Block


At Thursday’s direct action against the FTAA, we gathered in the ghost town of Miami city center. Some only partially awake at this early hour; sipped hot dark liquids while others danced to the sound of drums and protest chants. A group of steelworkers, not happy in only attending the ritualized AFL-CIO sponsored rally later in the day, were nervously grouped on the perimeter of the gathering. A smattering of public sector workers who hadn’t been given the day off in anticipation of violence and property damage looked on in curiosity, some popping off a few shots from their disposable cameras. This was the kick off to the day of direct action against the Free Trade Area of the Americas and it was shaping up to be a total disaster.

November 29, 2003 - 5:02pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The Doomsday Machine"

John Chuckman, November 27, 2003

It occurred to me to write a satire about Osama and the boys sitting around in the mountains somewhere holding a conference about the worst possible damage they could inflict on the United States and deciding that it would be whatever act got Bush re-elected.


But retired American General Tommy Franks came along and spoiled the fun. General Franks has followed the advice of the fictional Doctor Strangelove by announcing to the world what he believes will happen if the United States is attacked by terrorists using strategic weapons: he says Americans will scrap the Constitution and set up a military government.

November 29, 2003 - 4:39pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

An anonymous coward writes:

"The Heroes of Hell"
Mike Davis Talks with Jon Wiener
Radical History Review 85(2003), 227-237

Jon Wiener: I've heard through the grapevine that you are working on a book about terrorism.

Mike Davis: My day job currently is a grassroots history of Los Angeles in the sixties ["Setting the Night on Fire"]. But I have also been busy on an extracurricular project entitled, after a poem in Mother Earth, "Heroes of Hell." It aims to be a world history of revolutionary terrorism from 1878 to 1932.

November 26, 2003 - 12:57pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

"The War on Dissent: Heavy-handed Police and Propaganda Tactics Brought Baghdad to Miami"

Naomi Klein, Globe and Mail, November 25, 2003

In December, 1990, U.S. President George Bush Sr. travelled through South
America to sell the continent on a bold new dream: "a free-trade system that
links all of the Americas." Addressing the Argentine congress, he said that
the plan, later to be named the Free-Trade Area of the Americas would be
"our hemisphere's new declaration of interdependence . . . the brilliant new
dawn of a splendid new world."


Last week, Mr. Bush's two sons joined forces to try to usher in that new
world by holding the FTAA negotiations in friendly Florida.

November 26, 2003 - 11:52am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"From the Dangerous Classes to the Danger of the Multitude"
Toni Negri

The "corsi e ricorsi" of history are strange. It is renowned that throughout the history of capitalism the definition of ‘dangerous classes’ has been very flexible.


In the era of manufacture the poor were the dangerous: the multitude of penniless and vagabonds agricultural workers and landless peasants forced to move towards cities and factories. In the era of large industry, the workers became the ‘dangerous class’: assembled en masse in the factory, they exercised a pressure that affected all social relations; the dangerous class had to be pushed on the path of poverty, unemployment, and the industrial reserve army.


Today the poor is the enemy once again: in Postfordism, the flexible worker -- mobile and precarious, capable of producing cognitive and intellectual surplus -- is the enemy, threatened by means of exclusion, as if poverty was not enough. Precarious middle classes, taylorised intellectual labour and an immaterial labour force degraded through industrial instrumentalisation and the alienation of value: this is the fate of the new condition of poverty.

November 20, 2003 - 10:24am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Rob Eshelman writes:

"The Capital of Violence and the Violence of Capital"
Writer’s Bloc

We’ve already won. The City of Miami, Department of Homeland Security, and an array of private dicks and corporate media boosters have successfully accomplished what the movement aims to achieve at each anti-capitalist convergence -- the total shutdown of the host city.

Because of this victory, the carnival has begun, and as the late afternoon sun arcs down into the West and a cool evening Caribbean breeze blows across Biscayne Bay onto the Florida mainland, 300 anti-globalization activists march on downtown Miami.

November 19, 2003 - 3:47pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Dominance and Its Dilemmas"

Noam Chomsky

Transcript of the speech given by Noam
Chomsky in Havana, Cuba on November 3, 2003

The past year has been a momentous one in world
affairs. In the normal rhythm, the pattern was set in
September, a month marked by several important and
closely related events.

The most powerful state in history announced a new
National Security Strategy asserting that it will
maintain global hegemony permanently: any challenge
will be blocked by force, the dimension in which the
US reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums
began to beat to mobilize the population for an
invasion of Iraq, which would be "the first test [of
the doctrine], not the last," the New York Times
observed after the invasion, "the petri dish in which
this experiment in pre-emptive policy grew." And the
campaign opened for the mid-term congressional
elections, which would determine whether the
administration would be able to carry forward its
radical international and domestic agenda.

November 16, 2003 - 11:02am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Rob writes:


FTAA Countdown in Miami

Threatening dissenting trade representatives with serious repercussions and promising those countries who open their markets to northern capital with friendly treatment, US trade representative Robert Zoellick has confidently predicted a successful round of negotiations in Miami. Absent from his confident calculations is the 20,000 protesters who will be on hand for days of demonstrations in opposition to the establishment of a Free Trade Area of the Americas. Fresh off a victory in Cancun we’re determined to make this round of capitalist talks another glorious failure.

November 11, 2003 - 11:32am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Postanarchism in a Nutshell"

Jason Adams


In the past couple of years there has been a growing
interest in what some have begun calling
"postanarchism" for short; because it is used to
describe a very diverse body of thought and because of
its perhaps unwarranted temporal implications, even
for those within this milieu, it is a term that is
more often than not used with a great deal of
reticence. But as a term, it is also one which refers
to a wave of attempts to try to reinvent anarchism in
light of major developments within contemporary
radical theory and within the world at large, much of
which ultimately began with the Events of May 1968 in
Paris, France and the intellectual milieu out of which
the insurrection emerged.

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