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Analysis & Polemic

April 30, 2003 - 9:46am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Which War Are You Watching? The View from Spain"

Dwight Reynolds

The American media's portrayal of the routing of Saddam Hussein as a great
military victory and a step toward world peace is almost incomprehensible
outside of the U.S., for the rest of us have been watching a very
different war.

April 29, 2003 - 12:54pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

jim submits:

"May Day at Kut & Kienthal"

Peter Linebaugh

Inasmuch as the historian's craft depends on written records, then the answer to the question posed in the title of V. Gordon Childe's classic book about the Tigris and Euphrates, What Happened in History? is well answered in the title of another classic book on the same subject by Samuel Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, because that's where writing began. With the American "liberation" of Iraq and the subsequent destruction of the library of Baghdad and its museum of antiquities, we could say, therefore, that history while not quite coming to an end has become impossible to write.

April 28, 2003 - 2:43pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"In Jesus' Name"

John Chuckman

My subject is Franklin Graham, one of President Bush's very-public religious confidants. Franklin's father, Billy, served President Nixon in a similar capacity. Billy's efforts were crowned with a kind of earthly immortality: he's on those White House tapes in the National Archives sharing anti-Semitic remarks with Nixon and never flinching or clearing his throat over the idea of using atomic bombs in Vietnam.

April 27, 2003 - 10:58am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

jim submits
"Reappropriations of Public Space"

Toni Negri


1. For a good twenty years things had followed a fairly regular pattern -- at least since the crisis of 1971-74, when, having digested the struggles of the 1960s and defeat in the Vietnam War, multinational capital relaunched its project of development in terms of liberal policies and post-industrial modernisation. These were the years in which neo-liberalism imposed itself: grey years, even if they were illuminated, as was the case in France, by a number of working-class offensives (that of 1986, for example) and by a succession of student explosions -- the first manifestations of the revolt of immaterial labour -- around which social protest attempted in vain to organise itself. December 1995 in France marked the first mass break with the political, economic and ideological regime of the liberal epoch.

April 27, 2003 - 1:23am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

jim submits:

"Between 'Historic Compromise' and Terrorism:

Reviewing the Experience of Italy in the 1970s"

Toni Negri, Le Monde Diplomatique, August-September, 1998

Translated by Ed Emery

[Toni Negri was one of the historic leadership of the Italian revolutionary group Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and is currently serving a prison sentence in Rebibbia prison, Rome. Negri gave himself up on 1 July 1997 after 14 years' exile in Paris in a bid to close a chapter in his own personal "judicial history" and that of other far-left militants still in exile. Originally sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment for "armed insurrection against the state" and to four and a half years for "moral responsibility" for the clashes between revolutionary activists and police in Milan between 1973 and 1977, he theoretically still has over four years to serve. Waiting for a general remission (indulto) from the Italian parliament which has not as yet materialised, he was authorised to work on day-release at the end of July. In the following article, he recalls the political experience of the 1970s in Italy.]

To speak of what the 1970s represented in Italy's political history is to speak also of the present. In part, because the consequences of the repressive policies of those years are still very much with us. The Special Laws have not been repealed, at least 200 people are still in prison and about the same number are living their lives in exile(1). Also, because the disintegration of the post-war political system, shattered to pieces by the fall of the Berlin Wall, had reached intolerable limits. But above all, because the social (and psychological) traumas of that decade have still not been healed or distanced.

April 27, 2003 - 1:11am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

jim submits:

"French Intellectuals Mobilise for the Liberation of Toni Negri"

Catherine Bedarida, Le Monde, translated by Ed Emery, December 13, 1997

A thousand people have signed a petition in support of the philosopher Toni Negri, at the same time as Italian public opinion is becoming increasingly concerned about the fate of another former leading figure in the extreme Left, Adriano Sofri.

April 24, 2003 - 6:47pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Peter Linebaugh: Magna Carta and the Commons, part two.


Click here for the first part of this article.


Edward Coke's "Fine Fetch"



Four centuries later the 17th century crisis of political legitimacy began. From the Tudor autocracy at the beginning of the century to the Whig oligarchy at the end, and passing through civil wars among the 'four kingdoms' and the bourgeois revolution in between -- the crisis was conducted in terms of Magna Carta. Edward Coke was the hero of Magna Carta's chapter 39 and its myth-maker. [26] Dismissed as Chief Justice of King's Bench, imprisoned in the Tower, he helped draw up the Petition of Right of 1628. Charles I heard he was working on a book on Magna Carta. As Coke lay dying, his chambers were ransacked and his manuscripts were confiscated. At the beginning of the English Revolution Parliament ordered their recovery and they were published posthumously in 1642.

April 24, 2003 - 6:30pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Ben_Meyers writes: Here is the first section of an essay in two parts by Peter Linebaugh. The second can be found here.

"MAGNA CARTA AND THE COMMONS, Or, How Bad King John Pretended to Launch a Crusade against Islam in order to better Conceal his Robbery of the People's Hydrocarbon Energy Resources which at the time (1215) took the form of Woodlands; and, Whether the Hydrocarbon Energy Resources which in our day (2003) take the form of Petroleum can be Restored to the "communa tocius terre," or not." *

Peter Linebaugh



Since 9/11 we have suffered losses of liberties derived from Magna Carta. Habeas corpus has suffered particularly. Justice by trial by jury has suffered a mounting, attack; the prohibition against torture wilts; and more and more domains of action fall outside the rule of law altogether. In the bill of particulars which we, the powerless, imagine will accompany the indictment of the usurper, George Dubya Bush, for the crimes of war and riches, reference may be made to Magna Carta. What is Magna Carta? A voice from the jungle helps to explain.

April 24, 2003 - 9:11am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Workers Solidarity Alliance writes

"Reclaiming May Day"

Workers Solidarity Alliance


May 1st, International Workers' Day, commemorates the historic struggle of
working people throughout the world, and is recognized in nearly every
country except the U.S. and Canada. This despite the fact that the holiday
began in the 1880's in the U.S., with the fight for an 8-hour workday.

April 24, 2003 - 8:03am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Jason Adams writes:

"The Re-embedding of the War Machine:

Resistance to Mediation in Societies of Primary Orality and Primary Literacy"

By Jason Adams

"The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize -- the State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging or conquering the State?" -- Deleuze and Guattari, 1987

Introduction

In the course of "Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine," Deleuze and Guattari construct a theory about the mediation of everyday life, based on Clastres' argument that nomadic (oral, gatherer-hunter) societies are marked by the presence of a "war machine" at the core of their social being, which serves to ward off the emergence of the state-form. Thus the function of war in oral societies is not to win hegemony but rather "to assure the permanence of the dispersion, the parceling, the atomization of groups" which, as Deleuze and Guattari state, valorizes the smooth space of difference over and against the striated space of identity. These assertions are well supported by contemporary political anthropology; as I will show in this essay, Sahlins, Goody and others have demonstrated that the Paleolithic era was marked primarily by multiplicity and abundance; thus hegemony and scarcity were not, as is often stated, the norm for the majority of the species' lifespan prior to "civilization."

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