hydrarchist writes:

The following is a dialogue with
Anne DuFourmantelle from Negri's recently published "Abecedaire Politique" (Calmann-Levy 2002), and was translated by Thomas Seay.

E as in Empire

Anne DuFourmantelle: What can you tell us about the
concept of Empire that you developed with Michael
Hardt?

Toni Negri: Our work together has been most of all a
work on linguistic clarification. Indeed, the word
"Empire" might seem ambiguous. It immediately
appeared in political and journalistic vocabularies
and rapidly became static. Nevertheless, by "Empire"
we intend something very precise: the transfer of
sovereignty from Nation-states to a superior entity.
This transfer has almost always been understood in
terms of an "internal analogy", that is to say, as if
Empire were implicitly a nation-state the size of the
world.

"Misinformation About Iraq

A Fantastical Future, Predicted by the Terminally Disengaged"

By Edward Said, Counterpunch, December 3, 2002

The flurry of reports, leaks, and misinformation about the looming US war against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq continues unabated. It is impossible to know, however, how much of this is a brilliantly managed campaign of psychological war against Iraq, how much the public floundering of a government uncertain about its next step. In any event, I find it as possible to believe that there will be a war as that there will not. Certainly the sheer belligerency of the verbal assaults on the average citizen are unprecedented in their ferocity, with the result that very little is totally certain about what is actually taking place. No one can independently confirm the various troop and navy movements reported on a daily basis, and given the lurching opacity of his thinking, George W Bush's real intentions are difficult to read. But that the whole world is concerned -- indeed, deeply anxious -- about the catastrophic chaos that will ensue after another Afghanistan-like air campaign against the people of Iraq, of that there is little doubt.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"Don't Trust Anybody, Not Even Us!"

A Brief History of Czech Anarchism

The motto in the title, attributed to the anarchists of the 20th century,
is typical for the anarchist movement in Bohemia, not only in the
way that it warns against considering anarchism as a dogma.
Czech anarchists also propheticly warned against themselves. The
history of Czech anarchism is a history of a development of
libertarian radicals, who left their ideas and moved into high policy
posts, or became propagandists of the Bolshevik totalitarian
ideology. And even after the revival of the anarchist movement we
can see how the movement politicizes and forms stable
organizations, at the other hand also its cutting-off into activistic
ghettos. The history of the Czech anarchism isn't just black and
white -- and that way perhaps more interesting and instructive.