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Analysis & Polemic

June 19, 2003 - 10:18am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"The Strategy of The Refusal"

Mario Tronti

This article develops a concept that has been fundamental to autonomous politics in Italy -- the concept of the working-class refusal -- The refusal of work, the refusal of capitalist development, the refusal to act as bargaining partner within the terms of the capital relation. If we accept Tronti's description of the working class as developing within the structures of capitalist production, but outside of, free from, its political initiative, then we have a test-bed for a radical critique of current forms of Marxist orthodoxy regarding organisation. The argument contained in this piece is developed still further -- in the context of a new class composition -- in Toni Negri's concept of working class and proletarian "self-valorisation", contained in the article "Domination and Sabotage". The Strategy of the Refusal was written in 1965 as part of the "Initial Theses 11" in Tronti's Operai e Capitale (Workers and Capital), Einaudi, Turin, 1966, pp.234-252. Another Tronti article from Operai e Capitale was published in the CSE pamphlet No.1: "The Labour Process and Class Strategies," 1976, ISBN 85035 025 5.

Adam Smith says -- and Marx comments on the accuracy of his observation -- that the effective development of the productive power of labour begins when labour is transformed into wage labour, that is, when the conditions of labour confront it in the form of capital. One could go further and say that the effective development of the political power of labour really begins from the moment that labourers are transformed into workers, that is, when the whole of the conditions of society confront them as capital. We can see, then, that the political power of workers is intimately connected to the productive power of wage labour. This is in contrast to the power of capital, which is primarily a social power. The power of workers resides in their potential command over production, that is, over a particular aspect of society. Capitalist power, on the other hand, rests on a real domination over society in general. But the nature of capital is such that it requires a society based on production. Consequently production, this particular respect of society, becomes the aim of society in general. Whoever controls and dominates it controls and dominates everything.

June 19, 2003 - 9:45am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Prisons & Prisoners

Stevphen Shukaitis writes:

"On Friday, June 20, 2003, Rise Up Radio (airing 11:00-11:55 am on WBAI 99.5 FM) will be airing a segment on Alex Asch, an anarchist organizer from New Jersey who has been held against his will for almost a year now in a Utah Mormon reform camp under the pretense of having 'Oppositional Defiance Disorder.' The show will be streaming live at
wbai and will be up loaded soon to radio4all."



"Just Call Them Crazy"

Stevphen Shukaitis



Alex Asch probably never thought he would be forced by police, private security, his parents, and the weight of the law to leave his choice of studies for a Mormon boot camp -- but on August 10, 2002 that's exactly what happened.



Alex was attending the Institute for Social Ecology, a radically inclined institution of higher education located in Plainfield, Vermont. It was the last day of summer classes when his parents hired two juvenile transport officers to remove him from the Institute. After removing him from the school he was forced to go to Turnabout Stillwater, a juvenile rehabilitation program located in Utah affiliated with the Mormon church.There he will be held against his will until his 18th birthday in June 2004. Youth activists and organizers have long been marginalized and ignored by their parents, teachers and lawmakers. Even when youth activism is accepted it is usually in a condescending or patronizing manner when older and more experienced organizers run and co-opt youth efforts. But for organizers like Alex the threat is much more explicit: Just call them crazy, drug them, coerce them, and keep them locked up.

June 19, 2003 - 9:37am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Hall of Mirrors"

John Chuckman

Perhaps you remember the "fun houses" that were once part of old big-city amusement parks? They were filled with mazes, frights, and surprises. Often, these included a hall of mirrors, a maze of rooms walled with mirrored doors. The confusion of reflections made the maze seem infinitely more complex than it actually was.

The relationship between political leaders and intelligence institutions is a great deal like a hall of mirrors. Looked at from a perspective above, a perspective not permitted most people, the maze may be fairly simple, but it is designed so that any individual trying to make his or her way through it is confused and set off balance.

June 19, 2003 - 8:39am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Race Politics



Né qui, né altrove - Migration, Detention, Desertion:

A Dialogue between Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson

University of Bologna :: University of Western Sydney


1. Sandro Mezzadra teaches the History of Contemporary Political
Thought at the University of Bologna. He is an active figure in the
alternative globalisation movement in Italy, and has been particularly
involved in bringing the question of migration to the centre of
political struggle in that movement. Sandro is the author of works
such as Diritto di fuga: Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione
(2001) and (with Fabio Raimondi) Oltre Genova, oltre New York: Tesi
sul movimento globale (2001). He is also a member of the editorial
collective of DeriveApprodi magazine, one of the chief venues in Italy
for the critical analysis of contemporary capitalism. We met in
Bologna one foggy January afternoon to discuss the global movement,
migration, and border control in Europe and Australia.


2. (Neilson) In your talk in the seminar 'Diritto a migrare, diritto
d'asilio' at the European Social Forum you emphasized that the
question of migration had become a central concern for the global
movement in Italy. While the issue of migration had not been a primary
concern at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, it had
emerged as a fundamental question in the lead-up to the Firenze
meetings, particularly in the wake of the G8 protests in Genova. Can
you describe how migration became a central issue for the global
movement, giving some detail about concurrent developments in border
control at the European level?

June 17, 2003 - 12:32pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist submits: Bruce E. brought this writer to my attention, although unfortunately little of his work is available on the web.

"The Great Utopia:

Outlines for a Plan of Organization and Activity of a Democratic Movement"

Josef Weber (Submitted in agreement with the editors and friends
of Dinge der Zeit and Contemporary Issues)

1

For thousands of years tormented humanity has been laboring at the solution of the
disconsolate and trivial tasks of how to eat, dwell and live in security; for thousands of
years, it has yearned for a paradise from which it feels itself expelled and to which it
wishes to return. The theme which myths and fairy tales sing of, the force which impels
masses into movement, the desideratum of founders of religions, what philosophers have
brooded over, the object of the enquiries of scientists, the visionings of poets, the
achievements or aspirations of statesmen and revolutionaries — all revolve round
these two poles and are nourished, at root, only by the terrible necessity for securing
the perpetuation of life in good or evil. But all endeavor had to remain fantasy and
Utopia, the problem of humanity could, in the final analysis, find merely a temporary
regulation “in evil” as long as it was not possible to produce sufficient goods
for the satisfaction of even the most urgent needs of everybody. This decisive difficulty
was only removed by the so-called Industrial Revolution, which, towards the
middle of the last century, also encompassed Germany and America and constituted the basis
for the “Communist Manifesto,” which appeared in 1848, that is, for scientific
socialism in general.

June 16, 2003 - 12:00pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Bernard-Henri Levy: 'Je Suis un Superstar' "

Gaby Wood,The London Observer, Sunday June 15, 2003

With his movie-star lifestyle, celebrity friends and best-selling books, writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is the darling of the French chattering classes. But can 'BHL' be serious?

When I arrive at Bernard-Henri Lévy's sumptuous apartment in the centre of Paris, a film crew is just packing up. There could hardly be a more fitting introduction: Lévy has, as his fellow intellectual Pierre Bourdieu once put it, an 'immoderate taste' for television studios, and his ubiquity has become something of a joke. Lévy is a bestselling writer, philosopher, political campaigner, pundit and luscious-locked superstud in France; but perhaps his greatest facility is for fame itself.

June 15, 2003 - 11:51am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Sketches of a Post-Foucauldian Anarchism"

Fing

The majority of anarchist literature I read seems to
have yet to absorb the analytics of power left as the
legacy of the French historian Michel Foucault. A
brilliant philosophical scholar, Foucault left us not
with a system of analysis, but rather a series of
critiques and suggestions that ultimately demolish all
systems of thought.

June 15, 2003 - 11:37am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Independent Media

jim submits:

"Rhizomatic Radio and the Great Stampede"

Ron Sakolsky

Let us conjure up a vision of a Wild Radio Stampede
disrupting the territorialized lines of Authority
artificially drawn in the air surrounding Mother
Earth. The seismic flows of land, sea, and air waves
reconceptualized as rhizomatic possibilities. Let the
leaden segmentary lines imposed by capitofeudalism
explode into detached shimmering lines of flight.
Rampaging sound wave tubers where each stem is itself
a rootstock emitting new roots everywhere along its
sonic path. Unstoppable drifting planetary waves of
radio sound laughing in the sedentary face of the
dominant mediacracy's uniformity. Immersion then
becomes a metaphor not for entrapment, but for escape
as receiver and producer become one in an oceanic roar
sounding in its composite signal like a combination of
Hiroshi Yokoi's 24 hour FM radio transmissions in
Japan programmed according to tidal patterns and
Tetsuo Kogawa's micropower radio broadcasts, inspired
by the radio experiments in "direct speech" of the
Italian Autonomists. The Autonomist trick of The
Serpent of Desire Eating Its Own Tail as performed by
Felix Guattari and the Schizzes, a "molecular
revolution" on a mixtape.

June 14, 2003 - 12:22pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"A Road Map to Where?"

Edward Said


Early in May, on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, Colin Powell met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and separately with a small group of civil society activists, including Hanan Ashrawi and Mostapha Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise and mild consternation at the computerised maps of the settlements, the eight-metre-high wall, and the dozens of Israeli Army checkpoints that have made life so difficult and the future so bleak for Palestinians.

June 13, 2003 - 6:34pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"The Failure of Christianity"

Emma Goldman

First published in April 1913, in the Mother Earth
journal.

Conceptions and words that have long ago lost their
original meaning continue through centuries to
dominate mankind. Especially is this true if these
conceptions have become a common-place, if they have
been instilled in our beings from our infancy as great
and irrefutable verities. The average mind is easily
content with inherited and acquired things, or with
the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much
easier to imitate than to create.

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