Radical media, politics and culture.

Reviews

Dr Wooo writes:

"Naomi Klein, No Logo, London: Flamingo, 2001 (pb. £8.99).

Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of
Democracy, London: Random House, 2001 (pb. £12.99).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000 (pb. £12.99).

Whatever the merits of Naomi Klein’s politics there can be little doubt that
No Logo was a timely intervention. In the theatre of struggles against the
effects of globalisation, Klein has become like a war correspondent: a Kate
Adie for the liberal left. As its publicity suggests the book became part of
a movement. But which movement? That of young activists devising ingenious
means of publicising their protests against multinationals and
trans-national alliances of political forces? Or the movement within the
media that has sought to mould the collective impression of these protests?


waaibevok writes "Ashwin Desai's "We Are The Poors" is one of the best books yet on globalization and resistance. Its secret is that barely mentions globalization, and instead weaves together richly told local stories that bring this grand and bland subject vividly to life.


Most books on corporate globalization (and I admit that I am a terrible offender) attempt to be global themselves. In the process, they can seem as placeless and generic as their subject: specificity is lost and the analysis can seem as free floating as a currency trade. "We Are The Poors" takes the opposite approach: Desai, a well-known South African activist and academic, lives in the Durban area, and that is where most of this book unfolds, with a few side trips to Cape Town and Johannesburg.

"Politicising or Opting Out?"

Martyn Hudson, Weekly Worker 457 Thursday November 21 2002

Reviewing Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically Leeds 2000, pp183, £8

Without question, the greatest tool Marx gave to the working class movement was Capital. It is almost facile saying this, but -- at a time when the academic study of this work has for all intents and purposes disappeared, and when the left is mired in its inability to transcend transparently outdated doctrines and categories -- we have to re-examine what Capital gave us. The publication of this work was a revolution in human thought. For the first time we had the uncovering of the nature of the historical process of accumulation and the social relations so entwined with it.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Take a look at this Mad magazine ad at Gulf Wars"

hydrarchist writes, this review as published in the second edition of the Make World Magazine. "For many years, Geert Lovink has carried out his work as net-critic
wandering across the territories where the net meets the economy,
politics, social action and art. Years of fast writing on mailing lists,
analysis, polemics, replies and reports have been collected and
elaborated in a way that maintains the rap-style of e-mail debates:
short sentences, ironic slogans, cuts and returns, allusions, cita-tions...
but what emerges from this mosaic is a coherent overall
view on the first decade of digital society.


Dark Fiber


Franco Bifo Berardi

This book is the first complete investigation of
global netculture, an analysis of the evolution
and involution of the web during the first decade
of its mass expansion. But Lovink goes beyond a
sociological, economic and anthropological survey.
Many of the essays in the book outline the
theoretical positions of various agents in the cyber-
cultural scene: Wired's libertarian ideology,
its economistic and neoliberal involution, and the
radical pessimism of European philosophers.
Outside of such confrontation, Geert's position is
that of a radical and pragmatic Northern-Europe-an
intellectual close to autonomist and cyber-punk
movements, who has animated the cyber-cultural
scene for a decade with his polymorphous activity as writer and moderator of
connective environments such as nettime.org,
and as organiser of international meetings.

Anonymous Comrade writes (from Daybreak #3):

Carlos Cortez, ed., Viva Posada! A Salute to the Great Printmaker of the Mexican Revolution. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2002.

Before I ever heard of the EZLN’s rebellion in Chiapas, I knew about the revolutionary power projected by the image of Emiliano Zapata thanks to the propaganda poster art of José Guadalupe Posada.

A few months ago I posted an article about "Surrealism, Freud and
Trotsky" (Surrealism, Freud and
Trotsky
) that
relied heavily on Franklin Rosemont's collection of Andre Breton's
writings titled "What is Surrealism." This Pathfinder book belongs on the shelf of anybody who is interested
in the intersection between revolutionary politics and avant-garde art
and literature.

Now thanks to Autonomedia Press we have a
volume that belongs on the same shelf. I refer to Surrealist
Subversions: Rants, Writings and Images by the Surrealist Movement in
the United States.
Edited and introduced by Ron Sakolsky, this volume
contains articles that originally appeared in the journal of Rosemont's
Chicago Surrealist Group titled "Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion," and
kindred publications.

hydrarchist writes:

Time to Revolt — Reflections on Empire

John Holloway

What is it about Empire that annoys me?

It is not the basic thesis. The idea that capitalism is a decentred and
deterritorialising system of rule, that the old understanding of the world
in terms of imperialism is not valid — this argument is unobjectionable. But
then it was always a mistake to see capital as being attached in some way to
a particular country. Capital is an inherently a-territorial relation of
domination. The Leninist notion of imperialism was misconceived from the
beginning. What is objectionable in Hardt and Negri's argument that
imperialism has been replaced by empire is the assumption that the concept
of imperialism used to be valid — but then this reflects the ambiguous
relation to Lenin that has always been present in Negri's writings and
indeed in much autonomist writing, beginning with Tronti's brilliant "Lenin
in England": the argument that things have changed since Lenin's time, now
we must rethink strategy, do what Lenin did in England.

Catching a Falling Knife: The Art of Day Trading

Interview with Michael Goldberg By Geert Lovink

Over the next three weeks artist Michael Goldberg will be betting on
Newscorp shares. The installation, Catching a Falling Knife, opens
tomorrow at Artspace in Sydney (Oct 17, 18.00). As Artspace's critic in
residence, together with Michael, I will report on the ups and downs of
Murdoch's media enterprise and Michael's efforts to play the market . The
following interview gives the reader an idea about Michael Goldberg's
previous work, his intentions and expectations. You can follow the project
at falling knife

"A Re[inter]view with Wu Ming"

Snafu


1954, a decade of Post-War. The Korean conflict has just shaken the world, the French are withdrawing from Indochina, McCarthy's witches hunt is almost over, the KGB is founded in Moscow. New lifestyles and desires for freedom are wriggling under the Cold War blanket.

This is the essence of 54, the novel authored by the Bologna-based Wu Ming collective ("No name") which was recently published in Italy (Einaudi, Turin, 666 pages, 15 euros). 54 is about the dialectical relationship between those two empires (which were going to become one, as Negri & Hardt would put it) and a manifold mankind that dreams of moving beyond the modern age and Fordist discipline on the workplace.

Pages

Subscribe to Reviews