Radical media, politics and culture.

Analysis & Polemic

November 20, 2011 - 10:05pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Egypt, since the fall of Mubarak in February, has been run by a military
junta, the SCAF, which has left untouched the basic structures of the
dictatorship. Protests and strikes have been met with extraordinary
violence, unions have faced draconian laws to make impossible any
action, torture has been widely practised, and there has been selective
repression against revolutionary militants in the social movements.
12,000 people have faced military courts during this
counter-revolutionary crackdown against the living forces and demands

October 24, 2011 - 11:32am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

'Occupy' Goes Global: Is Another World Possible?
Francesca Rheannon

The Occupy movement is birthing a new global paradigm of democratic
governance. Can capitalism adapt?

On October 15, 2011, a tide of protests swept across 1,500 cities in 82
countries as the Occupy movement went global. The largest were in Spain,
where more than a million people filled squares in Madrid, Barcelona,
Valencia and other cities all over the country. That’s not surprising,
given that Occupy Wall Street, which sparked the global day of protests,
itself took inspiration from (among others) the massive demonstrations
of the Spanish “indignados” in May of this year.

In Santiago, Chile, 100,000 marched; Lisbon: 20,000; New York: 20,000;
Berlin: 10,000—to name only a few. Building on the protests occurring
earlier this year, from the Arab Spring to Spain, Greece, Chile, Tel
Aviv and now the USA, the Occupy movement is spreading a new culture of
participatory democracy around the globe.

October 24, 2011 - 11:18am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

The Original Mad Men
What Can OWS Learn From a Defunct French Avant-Garde Group?
Gary Kamiya

Strange bedfellows don’t get any stranger than this. To the joy of a few
dozen graduate students and culture jammers, and the utter bemusement of
just about everybody else, the most significant American protest
movement in years has been spending time under the sheets with an
obscure French avant-garde movement whose ideas are so crazily
millenarian they make Jacques Derrida look like Mitt Romney.

I’m referring to the peculiar liaison between Occupy Wall Street and the
Situationists – creators of one of those whacked-out intellectual
commodities that have constituted France’s most lucrative cultural
exports for more than a century.

October 16, 2011 - 3:57pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

The Crackdown in Spain
Peter Gelderloos

Back in June, the popular rage that has been growing in Barcelona, in tandem with other parts of the world, coalesced once again as 200,000 people blockaded the Catalan Parliament in an attempt to prevent the passage of the latest austerity laws. These laws cannot accurately be called cutbacks, for in addition to slashing healthcare and education, they augment the ranks and arsenal of the police and continue the urbanization projects that tailor the city to the needs of tourism and social control.

October 14, 2011 - 9:46am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

The Indignados of Football and the Arab Spring
Play the Game Conference Day 1
Martin Hardie

When Organizer Jens Sejer Andersen addressed the opening session of the 2012 Play The Game Conference, which is being hosted by the German Sports University in Cologne, he spoke of the fact that today is a holiday in Germany which celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall. Play The Game he said gave asylum to those who speak the unheard of stories of global sport – the stories that the institutions and the corrupt of the sporting world would rather not hear, the stories they would rather suppress. The image he intentionally created was that the Conference was a place for the indignados of the sporting world to come together, to hear each other, to reflect, and hopefully to inspire action.

October 8, 2011 - 3:22pm -- kawonid
Analysis & Polemic
Theory









 
 
 
 

February 14, 2011 - 6:15am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"The Rebellion of the Poor Comes to Grahamstown" Xola Mali, Ayanda Kota, Nombulelo Yame

The rebellion of the poor has been spreading from town to town, from squatter camp to squatter camp, since 2004. Last week it arrived in Grahamstown.

There is no third force, political party or communist academic behind our struggle. It is oppression at the hands of the African National Congress that has driven us into the rebellion of the poor. We are in rebellion because we are being forced to live without dignity, safety or hope.

February 6, 2011 - 10:29am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Economy

The Libertarian Left:
Free-Market Anti-Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal
Sheldon Richman

Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign introduced many people to the word
“libertarian.” Since Paul is a Republican and Republicans, like
libertarians, use the rhetoric of free markets and private enterprise,
people naturally assume that libertarians are some kind of quirky
offshoot of the American right wing. To be sure, some libertarian
positions fit uneasily with mainstream conservatism—complete drug
decriminalization, legal same-sex marriage, and the critique of the
national-security state alienate many on the right from libertarianism.

February 5, 2011 - 10:12am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

"Surrealism in the Arab World"
Maroin Dib, Abdul Kadar El-Janabi, Faroq El Juridy, Fadil Abas Hadi, Farid Lariby & Ghazi Younis

The current resurgence of surrealism in the Arab world is a revolutionary development of the greatest significance, demonstrating once more that the strategy of the unfettered imagination is always and necessarily global.

We publish here in English translation a manifesto in which our Arab comrades express their unequivocal interventionist orientation, sharply defined against their specific political and cultural background.

February 5, 2011 - 10:09am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

"Surrealism, Politics and Culture"
Neil Matheson

The celebrated photographs of André Breton, Diego Rivera and Léon Trotsky posing together in Mexico in 1938, at the time of their joint manifesto Pour un Art révolutionnaire indépendant, are usually seen as emblematic of a certain convergence of culture and revolutionary politics – and yet, paradoxically, most accounts of Surrealism’s engagement with politics pose the tide of revolutionary fervour as already receding by 1935, while 1938 has also been viewed as the year that Surrealism made the volte-face ‘from the street to the salon.’ A re-appraisal of Surrealism’s troubled relationship with political activism and organised politics has been long overdue, and therefore a collection which sets out not only to analyse in depth some of the key themes and crucial moments in that engagement, but also to rethink the condition of ‘the political’ itself in its relationship with culture, is to be welcomed.

Pages

Subscribe to Analysis & Polemic