Radical media, politics and culture.

Reviews

‘Hegemony or Survival’: The Everything Explainer

Samantha Power, New York Times Book Review, 4 January 2004

Reviewing Hegemony or Survival:

America’s Quest for Global Dominance


Noam Chomsky

New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 278 pp.


Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been heard to exclaim -- with
varying degrees of shame, bewilderment and indignation -- “Why do they
hate us?” The response tends to fall between two extremes. Bush
administration officials say, in essence, they hate us for who we are.
As President Bush has put it, “They hate progress, and freedom, and
choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians,
and Jews and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.” At the
opposite end stands the M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky. “Why do they hate
us?” Chomsky asks in “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global
Dominance.” “Because of you and your associates, Mr. Bush, and what you
have done.

jim writes:

"Didn't See The Same Movie"

Loren Goldner

Reviewing Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air:
Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che

London/New York, Verso, 2002

"The sleep of dialectical reason will engender monsters."

Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist-Maoist-'Third World Marxist" and Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents, under the rubric New Communist Movement, as the creations of pretty much the "best and the brightest" coming out of the American 1960's.

Who controls the past, Orwell said, controls the future. Read at a certain level, Elbaum's book (describing a mental universe that in many respects out-Orwells Orwell), aims, through extended self-criticism, to jettison 99% of what "Third World Marxism" stood for in its 1970's heyday, in order to salvage the 1% of further muddled "progressive politics" for the future, particularly where the Democratic Party and the unions are concerned, preparing "progressive" forces to paint a new face on the capitalist system after the neo-liberal phase has shot its bolt.

An anonymous coward writes:

"Comics Grow Up (Again):

World War 3 Chips Three Off the Old Block"

Paul Buhle

The Metamorphosis

By Peter Kuper

Crown, 79 pages, $18.00

Johnny Jihad: A Graphic Novel

By Ryan Inzana

NBM, 92 pages, $9.95

Portraits of Israelis & Palestinians (for My Parents)

By Seth Tobocman

Soft Skull Press, 120 pages, $15.95

We seem to be in the midst of a comics revival that comes, unanticipated and unbidden, from several quarters at once. Consider, for instance: On the heels of familiar Marvel figures at the megaplex, American Splendor serves up the art-house version, with Harvey Pekar as the Spider-Man of the smallish screen (and apparently on its way to Oscar nominations). Consider, at the literary highbrow level, the almost embarrassed miniburst of attention to assorted graphic-story hardbacks and their artists by the New York Times and New York Review of Books during the last 18 months or so, after an indifference decades in the making. And consider the current output.

"The Radical Imagination of Cornelius Castoriadis"

Scott McLemee

Paris in the forties was a city awash in forged identities and remade lives.
But few transformed themselves as completely as Cornelius Castoriadis. When
the young Greek émigré arrived, in 1945, he settled down to write a doctoral
thesis on the inevitable culmination of all Western philosophies in "aporias
and impasses." But by the end of the decade, he had quit academia to lead a
curious double life. As Cornelius Castoriadis, he worked as a professional
economist, crunching numbers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development. Meanwhile, adopting a number of aliases, he developed one
of the most influential bodies of political thought to emerge from the
non-Communist left over the last half century. Mr. Castoriadis's covert
writings helped to rally France's beleaguered anti-Stalinist left in the
fifties and to inspire the spectacular Paris revolt of 1968.

Ryan Griffis reviews:


Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices

A subRosa project, edited by Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding, Michelle M. Wright

Published by Autonomedia, 2003

"Mesa says that many of the women she worked with in the clean rooms are dead, gone before their time. 'I alone know of ten women who worked with me who are no longer here. It's more than just a coincidence.'" Ioffee, Karina, "The Clean Room Paradox," El Andar Magazine, Fall/Winter 2001


"Well the bosses think they're pretty clever with their doubletalk, and that we're just a bunch of dumb aliens. But it takes two to use a see-saw. What we're gradually figuring out here is how to use their own logic against them." Indian microelectronics worker quoted in Prema Murthy's "Mythic Hybrid"2002

"First-," "Second-" and "Third-Wave." It is interesting that the same metaphor has been used to describe social-technological paradigms as well as historical movements in feminism. Feminism may not often be associated with technological developments in the popular imagination, but there is a record of linkages between the trajectories of gender consciousness and technology.

Bowman38 writes:

Hello everyone, The Soft Cage explores the hidden history of surveillance -- from controlling slaves in the old South to implementing early criminal justice, tracking immigrants, and closely monitoring the poor as part of modern social work. It also explores the role computers play in creating a whole new world of seemingly benign technologies -- such as credit cards, website "cookies", electronic toll collection, "data minings", and iris scanners at airports.

With fears of personal and national security at an all-time high, this ever-growing infrastucture of high-tech voyeurism is shifting the balance of power between individuals and the state in groundbreaking -- and very dangerous -- ways.

Mr. Parenti, author of Lockdown America, offers a compelling and vital history lesson for every American concerned about the expansion of surveillance into our public and private lives. I highly recommend it. Bowman38

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Next5Minutes4
An International Festival of Tactical Media
September 11 - 14, 2003, Amsterdam
a report


by Snafu - 09/27/2003
from thing.net, http://bbs.thing.net/communicator.thing

As the curtain fell on the conclusive meeting of Next5Minutes4 (http://www.n5m.org) the feeling was widespread that tactical media (tm) are in the midst of fording a swift river. It is hard to say what tm will find on the other bank of the river because riding the currents of these precarious times already seems quite an engaging exercise. By definition, tactical media are unstable, in permanent crisis, malleable, and adaptable to mutating circumstances. Nevertheless, the previous edition of the festival which gave birth to tm and followed its early steps was held more than four years ago when two major global events were still to occur: 9-11 and the outbreak of the Seattle movement. Between these two, the collapse of the new economy undermined not only a business model but also a way of building sustainable networks and techno-social infrastructures.

Linebaugh's London Hanged

John Lea

Reviewing The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (second edition)

Peter Linebaugh, 2003 London: Verso books.

ISBN 1-85984-638-6, 491 pages

This review first appeared in The Chartist

Verso have done a great service by republishing Peter Linebaugh's magnificent study, first published in 1991, of the men and women of eighteenth century London hanged on the gallows at Tyburn. Linebaugh set out, as he put it, to "explore the relationship between the organised death of living labour (capital punishment) and the oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital).” Through a meticulous study of the historical documents and court records he demonstratedthat those hanged at Tyburn were, in the main, representatives, not of some special class of professional criminals or a lumpen ‘underclass’, but ordinary working men and women, largely indistinguishable from the working masses as a whole. The ‘crimes’ they had committed were in fact varieties of resistance to the growing imposition of the capitalist wage relationship by means of the criminalisation of traditional forms of distribution tolerated by and integrated into the lives of the poor as a whole.

This review was published by the excellent Counterpunch

"Rhymsters and Revolutionaries:
Joe Hill and the IWW"
Peter Linebaugh


Reviewing Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture

By Franklin Rosemont, (Charles H. Kerr: Chicago, 2003).

It's the right man by the right biographer at the right time.

Joe Hill's the man, the artist and song-writer of the Industrial Workers of the World. Franklin Rosemont's the biographer, the Chicago surrealist activist and publisher; the time is ours when warring monotheistic capitalism rains terror against a polyglot planetary proletariat privatized out of clean water, health care, and home. Joe Hill composed a song while awaiting execution under sentence of death by the authorities of the state of Utah. The song unifies the demands of the antiglobalization movement, not for "Communism," but a commons of actual equality and reparations of actual justice.

Workers of the world, awaken!
Rise in all your splendid might;
Take the wealth that you are making,
It belongs to you by right.
No one will for bread be crying,
We'll have freedom, love and health,
When the grand red flag is flying
In the Workers' Commonwealth.

Anonymous Comrade writes

People who are interested in Negri, Marx, Tronti, Deleuze, and Guattari might also be interested in The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and Prehistory of the Present


Summary

Re-reads Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogation of subjectivity.
What is the relation between the economy, or the mode of production, and culture, beliefs, and desires? How is it possible to think of these relations without reducing one to the other, or effacing one for the sake of the other?

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