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Reviews

July 23, 2002 - 3:33pm -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

Anonymous Comrade writes

Roads to Dominion:

Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States

By Sara Diamond




Reviewed by Michael Handelman




While left-wing social movements have been extensively analyzed, right-wing movements have been inadequately analyzed. Thus, frequently, liberal interpretations suggesting that right-wing movements are “fanatical” have become the dominant ideology. This is why Sara Diamond’s book “Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing movements and Political Power in the United States” is so vitally important for leftists. This review is an attempt to outline the contents of this excellent book.

July 12, 2002 - 3:23pm -- nomadlab
Reviews
Reviews


Mike Palecek writes:


PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOR:
A Requiem for Moral Patriotism


by William Strabala, Michael Palecek



The book deals with the historical necessity of protest in the U.S. and offers the lives and careers of these priests as example: Carl Kabat, Darrell Rupiper, Roy Bourgeois, Frank Cordaro, Larry Rosebaugh, Charlie Litecky.


PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOR:
A Requiem for Moral Patriotism


by William Strabala, Michael Palecek


380 pp., 2002
ISBN 1-892941-98-8 paper,
1-892941-99-6 hardcover


The book tells the story of a group of American men who happen to be priests ã who happen to have served decades in American prisons ã and the stalwart women who helped them form an international movement called Plowshares. In so doing, the book tells the morally patriotic story of America, a story told before only from behind an open hand across the face, like a football coach talking to his spotters in full view of a national television audience, afraid someone might see.

July 8, 2002 - 9:48am -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

geert lovinkwrites

"http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id =ns23507

Netocracy: The new power elite and life after capitalism

Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist

£17.99 Pearson/Reuters

WHAT would Karl Marx have made of the works of 20th-century radical
philosopher Gilles Deleuze -- or the cultural contagions or "memes"
identified by biologist Richard Dawkins? Maybe the old Newtonian rogue would
have been baffled into silence. We'd all have copies of Capital as Idea by
Friedrich Engels and Emma Goldman on our shelves, rather than Das Kapital.
It would probably be rather better than Marx's great unread work -- or
Netocracy for that matter.

June 18, 2002 - 9:05pm -- Uncle Fluffy
Reviews
Reviews

Chris Dixon writes "


The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization

Edited by Eddie Yuen, George Katsiaficas, and Daniel Burton Rose


Review by Chris Dixon


Since the WTO protests of 1999, there have been countless articles and books
purporting to "document" and "explain" the so-called "anti-globalization movement."
Plenty of academics, journalists, and NGO directors have capitalized on this
opportunity; indeed, more than a few have launched their careers with it. But
out of all the reams of commentary, very little is useful for those of us on
the ground as we work to broaden grassroots resistance, link movements, and
build anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist alternatives. Accurate, relevant documentation
and sharp analysis are hard to come by, particularly in books.


Enter The Battle of Seattle (Soft Skull, 2001). Bringing together
contributions from some fifty radicals stretching around the globe, this book
is a welcome breath of fresh air. Although it is dated by its obvious composition
before the events of September 11, 2001, the vibrancy and the lessons are even
more necessary and relevant today. As Eddie Yuen explains in the Introduction,
"one of the goals of this volume is to open up a dialogue between militants
and the broader movement, rather than denying that articulate militant voices
exist, as other collections have done." This it does, in a thankfully nondogmatic
way.

June 12, 2002 - 10:47am -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

Review: Empire and Revolution

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 'Empire' (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 2000), pb.

Charlie Post

(Charlie Post teaches sociology in New York City, is active in rank and
file organizing in the American Federation of Teachers and is a member of
Solidarity, a US socialist organization. The author thanks Vivek Chibber
and Kim Moody for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.)

'Empire' is a paradox. An overly long (478 pages with notes and index),
often abstruse intellectual exercise, 'Empire' would appear to be a work
destined to obscurity-to be read, at best, by small groups of left-wing
intellectuals ensconced in academia. However, the books has attracted
enormous attention, not only in the academy, but also in the mainstream
press and among anti-capitalist and global justice activists in both the US
and Europe. *1

May 1, 2002 - 11:06am -- jim
Reviews
Work

CELEBRATE  MOE!  A  Tribute  to  Moe  Foner

Apr  24, 2002

Town  Hall, NYC

Wednesday  April  24th  was  one  night  in  which  NYC's  Labor-Left  came  together  and  offered  no  sign  of  splits  or  tiring.  It  was  a  night  for  affirmation  and  honor  of  our  heritage  and  future...all  in  honor  of  Moe  Foner.

March 22, 2002 - 10:07am -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

Danny Yee writes

Free as in Freedom

Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software

Sam Williams

O'Reilly & Associates 2002, 225 pages, index

A book review by Danny Yee

http://dannyreviews.com/h/Free_Freedom.html

Free as in Freedom is a generally sympathetic but far from hagiographic biography of Richard Stallman, inspiration of the free software movement. While much of the material in it will be familiar to anyone actively involved with free software, there are, as Williams claims, "facts and quotes in here that one won't find in any Slashdot story or Google search". It is also an entertaining and accessible study, which I finished within a day of my review copy arriving.

March 20, 2002 - 1:10pm -- nomadlab
Reviews
Mainstream Media

"Let's Talk Class Again"

Thomas Frank


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n06/fran2406.htm

London Review of Books, 21 March 2002

Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes how the Media Distort the
News by Bernard Goldberg. | Regnery, 234pp., US $27.95,
11 December 2001


You will probably be surprised to learn of the massive
and virtually unchecked power that the Left holds in
the United States. After all, you'll say, aren't the
key American institutions -- the Presidency, the
Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the
corporations -- run by determined right-wingers or weak-
kneed centrists? And didn't American thinkers recently
proclaim the dawn of a capitalist millennium, a 'New
Economy' in which privatisation, deregulation and lower
taxes were taken to be their own justification, while
American CEOs mounted the heights of Davos and
instructed the world in the timeless principles of the
free market, as handed down by Milton Friedman, Ronald
Reagan and the prophets of Silicon Valley?

March 12, 2002 - 8:36am -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

Below, we reprint the review of Empire mentioned earlier on our site at

http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/11/0514239

Andrew Flood, "Is the Emperor Wearing Clothes?"

An anarchist review of Negri and Hardt's Empire

Empire review

The publication of Empire in 2000 created an intense level of discussion
in left academic circles that even spilled over at times into the liberal
press. This should please the authors, Antonio Negri, one of the main
theoreticians of Italian 'autonomous Marxism,' and a previously obscure
literature professor, Michael Hardt. It is clear that they see Empire as
the start of a project comparable to Karl's Marx's Das Kapital. The
Marxist Slavoj Zizek has called Empire "The Communist Manifesto for our
time".

Whether or not you think Empire will be as useful as Capital, it has
certainly made an impact. The web is full of reviews of Empire from all
angles of the political spectrum. Orthodox Marxists gnash their teeth at
it, while right wing conspiracy theorists around Lyndon la Rouche see it
as confirmation [1] of the existence of a plan for globalisation that
unites the 'left and right'. After S11 numerous US liberal and
conservative reviews [2] made a big deal out of Negri's 'terrorist past'
(he is under house arrest in Italy for being an ideological influence on
the Red Brigades). They eagerly seize on Negri and Hardt's description of
Islamic Fundamentalism as post- rather then pre-modern, and their claim that
it is a form of resistance to Empire as if this description was intended
as a justification for the attack.

March 12, 2002 - 6:59am -- jim
Reviews
Reviews

Bureau of Public Secrets Website Posts New Kenneth Rexroth Essays

"There is a lot of bullshit in Lawrence, Miller, or Patchen --
but their enemies are my enemies." (Kenneth Rexroth) Three new Rexroth essays are now online at the BPS website --

MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain


"It was the official culture which was schizophrenic, not Mark Twain. The whole meaning of Mark Twain is that he 'saw life steadily and saw it whole'... If Baudelaire was the greatest poet of the capitalist epoch... Mark Twain wrote its saga, its prose Iliad and Odyssey."

POETRY, REGENERATION, AND D.H. LAWRENCE

Lawrence

"Lawrence did not try to mislead himself with false promises, imaginary guarantees... Communion and oblivion, sex and death, the mystery can be revealed -- but it can be revealed only as totally inexplicable. Lawrence never succumbed to the temptation to try to do more. He succeeded in what he
did do."

KENNETH PATCHEN, NATURALIST OF THE PUBLIC NIGHTMARE

Kenneth Patchen

"Patchen has gone back to the world of Edward Lear and interpreted it in terms of the modern sensibility of the disengaged, the modern comic horrors of le monde concentrationnaire. It is as if, not a slick New Yorker
correspondent, but the Owl and the Pussycat were writing up Hiroshima."

* * *

The Bureau of Public Secrets website features "The Joy of Revolution" and other writings by Ken Knabb (recently collected in the book Public Secrets); Knabb's translations from the Situationist International (the notorious avant-garde group that helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France); and the Rexroth Archive (texts by and about the great writer and social critic Kenneth Rexroth).

BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS

P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701

Bureau of Public Secrets

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