Post-Anarchism Anarchy

Alpine Anarchist Meets Süreyyya Evren

2010-08-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

Greetings folks,

I recently added an interview with the Turkish post-anarchist Süreyyya Evren to the archive at www.TheAnarchistLibrary.org. I encourage you all to check it out.

Excerpt:

"We do not have one homogeneous universal postanarchism. Political cultures give birth to different anarchisms and different postanarchisms. The postanarchism we developed in Turkey has its unique sources and aims. And in many fundamental issues, it is significantly different from the postanarchism of English-speaking postanarchists, say, Saul Newman.

Postanarchism (and “new anarchism” in general), opens a new debate on classical anarchism. This is basically rereading and interrogating anarchist history writing with poststructuralist theories on knowledge and history. Postanarchism, very importantly, shows us a way to question how the history of anarchism was written... Who were the fathers of the “fathers of anarchism” in political history? Who/what was excluded?"

CFP Second Annual North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference

2010-08-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

CALL FOR PAPERS!!!

North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference

Toronto, Canada

January 15-16, 2011

Deadline for Proposals: November 1, 2010

The North American Anarchist Studies Network is currently seeking presentations for our second annual conference to be held at the Steel Worker’s Hall in Toronto, Canada. We are seeking submissions from radical academics, independent researchers, community activists, street philosophers and students. We invite those engaged in intellectual work within existing institutions, such as universities, but also those engaged in the production of knowledge beyond institutional walls to share their ongoing work. From the library stacks to the streets, we encourage all those interested in the study of anarchism to submit a proposal.

In keeping with the open and fluid spirit of anarchism, we will not be calling for any specific topics of discussion, but rather are encouraging participants to present on a broad and diverse number of themes- from the historical to the contemporary to the utopian. For inspiration, we have included a number of suggested themes that have been of interest us; we invite you to suggest and submit your own topics, papers, themes, panels and workshops:

* Theorizing Anarchism: Perspectives on Anarchist Studies

* Greening Anarchy: Anarchism and the Environment

* Bridging the Marxist/Anarchist Divide: Is Black and Red Dead?

* Race, Class & Solidarity: Migration Politics

* Indigenous Rights and Politics in (Occupied) North America

* Expanding the Anarchist Canon: Non-Western Anarchism(s)

* The South American ‘New Left’ and Anarchism

* ‘Queering’ Anarchy: Anarchism and LGBTQ Issues

* ‘Revolution’ in the 21st Century: The Meaning of Social Change Today

* Militant Research: Connecting Activism and Academia

* Practicing Anarchy: Organization, Insurrection and Anarchist Social Movements

* Envisioning Alternatives: Anarchist Utopias

* Anarchism and Radical (Dis)ability Politics

* The Greek ‘Crisis’ and Anarchist Responses

* Post-G20 Toronto: Learning from Toronto’s G20 Mobilizations

* Anarchist Cultural Perspectives and Practices

* The Post-Anarchist Challenge?

* Anarchists and Academia: The Perils, Pitfalls and Potentialities of the University

It is our sincere hope that this conference will, to the greatest extent possible, accurately represent the diversity of North American anarchist politics and thought; to that end, we encourage submission(s) in English, French, Spanish and in any other language or on any other topic you feel relevant to this experience and this community.

Send your proposal, including a short abstract, a working title and three keywords that describe your project to the Toronto NAASN Crew at naasntoronto@gmail.com.

For more information on the North America Anarchist Studies Network check out our website at www.naasn.org.

We look forward to hearing from you, organizing with you and, of course, learning from you!

New Article by Saul Newman: Postanarchism & Power

2010-08-02T17:57:00.001-07:00

This article develops a postanarchist conception of power by using Foucault to reveal some of the tensions and limitations within classical anarchist theory. As a Foucauldian poststructuralist analysis shows, the operation of power is more complex and constitutive than was allowed in classical anarchist theory, which tended to focus on state sovereignty. The revealing of the pervasiveness of power makes problematic any sort of ontological separation between society and power. However, rather than this insight undermining the possibility of anarchism - a form of radical politics that I argue is becoming more relevant today - it necessitates a certain modification of classical anarchism into postanarchism. Postanarchism might be seen as a new way of thinking about a politics of autonomy based on practices of freedom.

You will need access to this through your university proxy or else pay for it out of pocket. I can not control anonymous commenters who post a link to a downloaded copy here. :-)

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a923845889

The State as a Social Relationship: Gustav Landauer Revived

2010-07-13T08:59:00.000-07:00

From Jewdas - by Dov Neumann

Whilst in Sweden I was fortunate to bump into one of the most prolific scholars of anarchist studies active today. Gabriel Kuhn has not one, two but three books out this year, published by the newly established PM Press, and they couldn’t be more poles apart. One of them charts the Golden Age of Piracy’s radical landscape via a roster of thinkers that includes Nietzsche, Mao-Tse Tung and Foucault; another aims to establish the political legacy of the Hardcore Straight Edge Punk scene; the last provides the first major collection of English translations of a German-Jewish anarchist called Gustav Landauer.

Finally, Gustav Landauer in English! Well perhaps it says something about me but I harangued Kuhn for an interview, about Landauer specifically. It’s not that I’m not interested in proto-queer disabled pirates or anti-machismo sober revolutionaries, it’s just that Landauer’s big influence on many of my German friends has made me aware that his ideas are sorely missing from English speaking discourses.

So there we sat, around a large sticky table in Stockholm’s activist hangout number one – Kafé 44 – talking about a man who died ninety years ago; whose thoughts about socialism as anarchism, escaping the state, the Zapatistas (of 1914!), anti-semitism, oil corporations, mysticism and spirituality, and of course revolution itself, seem as remarkable today as they ever were.

Dov Neumann: Firstly, I’d like to say thank you very much for meeting me Gabriel.

Gabriel Kuhn: My pleasure.

DN: In front of me is a copy of what you’ve obviously been working on for several years now, Gustav Landauer's Revolution and Other Writings – a rather mammoth translation project if you don’t mind me saying so. To English speakers you’ve made available for the first time a serious body of the writings of probably the most important German Anarchist of the twentieth century. Essays, articles, pamphlets, personal letters, even a postcard.

GK: His politically focused texts anyway. I had to focus on his political writings because he also wrote a lot on the arts, literature and philosophy. His lectures on Shakespeare fill two volumes, for example, which isn’t exactly in the scope of this book.

DN: But Landauer died, or rather was killed, in 1919. Why revive him today?

GK: I think there are two aspects for me. Firstly, I think that if you translate a text – whether it’s 50, 100, 200 years old – if you consider an author important in anarchism, a social movement, philosophical school or whatever: it’s a valuable research tool in itself.

However, I would say that what’s special about Landauer is that he really presented a definition of anarchism and socialism – he used the terms interchangeably – that is, I dare say, pretty unique.
He began his theoretical development with a broadly ‘class-struggle anarchist’ approach to politics, but ended up developing something of a spiritual understanding of socialism. It strongly focused on people finding something within themselves that cultivated inner change, from which values like mutual aid and solidarity would come naturally; rather than through a rational code where you might think, ‘Well it’s better for others therefore it’s better for me.’

DN: He was quite opposed to that kind of rationalism, wasn’t he?

GK: Absolutely. He believed that on that basis you couldn’t develop socialism because people wouldn’t really feel connected to one another. To do so you’d have to, and this is where it becomes complicated because it’s mystical, discover the inner essence of humanity that lies within each individual. You have to turn inwards first and discover this inner essence, and then you will perceive humankind in a different sense and approach people differently.

DN: Difference is a key word for Landauer. For example he vehemently opposes Esperanto for trying to unite humanity with one language. He makes an almost Tower of Babelesque critique.

GK: That’s a good example of Landauer’s opposition to rationalist measures of bringing people together. I guess Esperanto was to him a cold, mechanical idea of providing some kind of common structure of finding one another. Rather, people best do so through cherishing their own cultural traditions, expressions and language.

The idea of a homogenous socialist utopia was not something that appealed to him. If you’re not able to embrace all cultural forms that human kind has produced: you cannot embrace all of human kind, you cannot establish socialism. His idea of difference goes beyond a mere concept of tolerance. Socialism has to ‘grow’, that’s a word that appears often in his writings, it has to grow from the diversity of human beings and cultures that make up humanity.

DN: Perhaps that relates to his agrarianism, his belief in the revolutionary potential of agricultural settlements – what we would now call communes. I laughed when I read in your introduction how he visited one of these pioneering settlements, the Neue Gemeinschaft, but left ‘Disillusioned with the escapism they mistook for social transformation’, as you wrote. My own experience precisely!

GK: His settlement idea is superficially one of a commune movement: you move to the country, set up your commune, hope that more and more people will do the same. That is part of Landauer’s idea, but that alone would not suffice. Your commune could never be an isolated island. It has to be connected to its context and it has to have an impact on society overall.

DN: Does this slow settlement idea make Landauer something of an ‘evolutionary’ anarchist?

GK: Some people have argued that rapid social transformations are contrary to his beliefs, and therefore he’s been criticised for joining the 1918 Bavarian Revolution. I see that as rather short sighted. Landauer did believe that in certain times revolution could be part of a movement to create a better world. He just never thought that socialism could be achieved by changing the structure of government or establishing workers councils. He saw it as an important step but not the one thing that would establish socialism.

Eventually, for Landauer, the state would disappear because it would no longer be necessary. He famously defines it as a ‘social relationship’ between people. You abolish it by developing different relationships and not by changing the political system or the economic structure.

DN: In a way that’s quite a Post-Structuralist way of understanding power.

GK: I think so. For example Foucault’s theory of power stresses that aspect, that a lot of our power structures are reproduced in personal relationships, not just in government institutions. So I think that is one aspect in which Landauer’s theories fit in with more contemporary theory. Another is with the idea of ‘counter-power’, where you try to build a parallel underground society and use that to escape and diminish the power of the state. I think a lot of contemporaries would find something interesting in Landauer’s writings which goes beyond merely satisfying a historical interest.

DN: Landauer had a Jewish background. Did that affect his ideas?

GK: His thoughts on Judaism emerged only later in his life. Like many secular Jewish intellectuals at the time he almost made a point of not addressing that part of his identity. The spiritual aspects of his central political text Revolution focus on Middle Age Christian mystics, not Jewish mysticism. Judaism comes in his later essays, where he confronts the anti-semitism inherent in the Beilis Trial, and seemingly discovers Jewish mysticism for the first time, with the help of his close friend, the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber.

DN: Did he join in with Buber’s enthusiasm for some form of Jewish state?

GK: Landauer just started joining the discussion on Zionism a few months before he died. He was invited to a couple of conferences that dealt with Zionism and settlement projects in Palestine but he couldn’t attend because of the events in Munich, in which he was killed.

DN: He was invited by Nachum Goldman, founder and president of the the World Jewish Congress, right?

GK: Exactly. All we have there are a couple of letters between Landauer and Goldman where Landauer expresses, if you will, – hesitant – interest. It’s really hard to tell whether Landauer would have actively supported settlements in Palestine. Nevertheless, a lot of people in the early kibbutz movement were directly inspired by his idea of developing socialism through a network of agricultural settlements.

It’s hard to believe Landauer would have supported Jewish statehood. Perhaps he would have shared his friend Margarete Susman’s anti-statist interpretation of Zionism; Zionism as part of an international socialist movement. Even before the events of 1948 she declared explicitly that the Zionist movement must not turn into a nationalistic, nation-state-building movement: that would kill the whole idea.

DN: It has been argued that Landauer named his Sozialistische Bund organisation (Socialist Association) that way because of the link between the German word ‘Bund’ and the Hebrew word ‘bris’ (covenant). Would he perhaps have favoured the other significant Hebrew related Bund at the time – the Yidisher Arbeiter Bund (Yiddish Workers Association) – over the Zionist cause? Their values seem closer to his . . .

GK: I’m not aware of any direct links to the Yidisher Arbeiter Bund. That said, if he had lived longer, he would probably have seen the return of Rudolf Rocker [important German anarcho-syndicalist; leading light in London's Yiddish-anarchist movement, despite not being Jewish] to Germany, and it would have been interesting to see what their contact would have been.

In a sense, much of the Yidisher Arbeiter Bund‘s ideas would fit with Landauer’s beliefs. You have this universal, socialist-anarchist ideal, but if your cultural background is Jewish, or you come from a Yiddish speaking background, you want to pursue that as well, because that’s what allows you to formulate and express your ideas best.

DN: One of your next projects, I gather, is something of an accompaniment to your Landauer book. You’re translating a major body of writings from a German anarchist who is even less known outside Germany than Landauer: his friend Erich Mühsam.

GK: Yes. They were the two most important German anarchists of the century. Mühsam was influenced by Landauer’s spiritual socialism and they collaborated quite a lot in writing and action. Both had similar backgrounds – Jewish, middle class – Mühsam was ten years younger though and throughout his entire life saw Landauer as a kind of mentor-teacher. The main difference between the two was that Mühsam was closer to class-struggle anarchism, considering the proletariat a revolutionary subject. Landauer was more skeptical. . .

DN: Landauer called the proletariat ‘Significant but overrated’!

GK: Exactly. The other major difference was that Mühsam, while being very close to the ideas of proletarian council communism, was also a prototypical bohemian. Free love, artist-colonies and so on were important things for him. And that was a conflict between him and Landauer. Landauer considered the family the smallest unit of a socialist society, where you craft the solidarity and mutual aid. He had a well known love affair with a Swiss syndicalist called Margarethe Faas-Hardegger which ended when Margarethe wrote an article which criticised the nuclear family unit and argued for communal child rearing. He also didn’t feel comfortable discussing rights for homosexuals, which Mühsam was very involved in. So there was a conflict there, but they were good friends and shared a lot of ideas. Mühsam would eventually be one of the first prominent victims of the early Nazi concentration camps.

Gabriel Kuhn holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and lives as a writer and translator in Stockholm, Sweden. Currently, he is mainly working with Unrast Verlag in Germany and with PM Press in the US.

Call for Submissions: Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies

2010-06-05T13:02:00.001-07:00

Friends,

Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies is an open-access, peer-reviewed, journal devoted to the study of new and emerging connections across disciplines in contemporary anarchist studies. We publish articles, reviews/debates, announcements and unique contributions that (1) adopt an anarchist standpoint with regards to analyses of language, discourse, culture and power; (2) investigate or incorporate various facets of anarchist thought and practice from a non-anarchist standpoint; (3) investigate or incorporate elements of non-anarchist thought and practice from the standpoint of traditional anarchist thought. We are seeking contributions for our first ever issue. There is no deadline for submissions, but you should submit early if you would like to see it in the first issue. Email contributions to Duane(dot) Rousselle (at)unb (dot)ca or create an account and submit your contribution to our website at http://www.anarchist-developments.org. We plan to produce a print version of the journal in the future.

Please circulate.

Thank you,

Duane Rousselle

Sureyyya Evren

Frere Dupont on Councilism & Anarchism: Is Dupont a Post-Anarchist?

2010-04-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

A collection of excerpts by Frere Dupont

1. I am at pains to relate the question of workers councils to the existence of many millions of people and their relation to their environment rather than to the question of political positions, this involves the application of certain theoretical filters.

2. To this end, I did not want to find myself in agreement with the left-anarchist position on self-management but I did not want to simply disagree with it.

3. It may seem strange, it does to me, to propose a critique of events and actions that have not yet occurred, but my interest is not so much located in the future as in the alterations that are effected within possible positions we are able adopt in the present with regard to possible future events. Obviously, the alteration in definition of a future goal transforms the activities that are deployed in the present which are aimed at achieving/relating (to) it. I say 'obviously' but as the goal only really exists in purposeful activities in the present, its transformation is quite subtle and complex.

4. Specifically, in attempting to think in terms of algorithms and the functions within processes playing out or unfolding it removes that terrible, and tragic, burden of having to decide which reality to choose (as if that were in any way possible).

5. The more decision, policy making and so on are contextualised, the less the tyranny of 'either/or' will dictate - in the case of any proposed free decision making at any critical juncture mere prejudice and fear have a much greater impact than any of us are prepared to admit.

There will be workers' councils, if there is a genuine economic crisis of capital, there will be workers' councils.

The problem ought not to be viewed as the advocacy of councils within a milieu where it is set up on its merits against other options, as a strategy or solution that must be pursued, but of what happens next, what happens once the councils are established.

It is inevitable, as capital flees from industrial crisis, i.e. from its inability to reproduce the terms of its relation and extract value from its processes, that process will attempt to manage itself. During a crisis in the productive relation the proletariat will go with the pressure of necessity and step in to take control of production - general economic conditions will force such a move, the proletariat will respond positively initially to ensure its own survival, and because that will seem like the only realistic option open to it. It will attempt to manage 'business as usual' because it will not yet understand the contradiction in that act, i.e. that its continued existence within the productive relation (and production itself) is contrary to its interest.

There will be no reason to advocate the instigation of self-management when this will inevitably emerge anyway as an algorithmic working out of the 'liberated' forces of production. The problem is what these liberated forces will then be saying to humanity in general at that particular moment and through self-management, its necessary form. We know what the councilists and left anarchists want the council form to express: it being the institution of the triumph of use over exchange.

But I do not think productive forces will forget their exploitative character and allow themselves to be socialised as easily as many left anarchists imagine. Class based existence is written through the processes of the factory and this will automatically attempt to reassert itself behind, beyond and through any decisions (and decision making bodies) set up 'against' it, and in favour of socialised production.

Will the workers' council form ever have sufficient power to rein in and transform the autonomous capitalist character of the forces of production? There is no evidence that it will.

The question beyond that of the relation of workers' councils to crisis, the question raised after that of the councils' established existence as the embodiment of suspended value production, is located in the critiques which will be developed because the councils exist, because of their algorithmic aspect within production, and their relation to value, their role in the return to the capitalist form, but also, in the other direction, to the prospect of a genuine human community.

Most left anarchists will be transported into patriotic ecstasies by the coming-to-be of the council form because the form itself is their ideology. They will not be troubled by the form's intrinsic, just-so quality, this after all can be explained historically as a new phase, a new epoch. As the councils are established, the anarchists will institute their bureaucracies, principles, and declarations that set the limit of society and humanity itself as the celebration of the form. These partisans of the council, and of the fetish for 'self-management', will be the last to recognise that these ideologies also function as a 'fetter' (to use Marx's term), and thus will become ther reactionary defenders' of the new alienation.

By contrast, the inevitable critique will initially be undertaken in terms of the alienation experienced from the allegedly objective character of the forces of production, both by communists, who will illuminate the non-identity between communism and the council form, and by the individualist anarchists via their revolt against the generalised imposition of work and the ideological character of 'use'.

The theoretical critique of workers' councils begins in the general tendency experienced in all historical examples of the form - that is, self-management of production by the proletariat has always, and without exception, facilitated the return of capitalism. The question of the nature of this facilitation is open to discussion in this seminar: either, 1) the councils were too weak, not generalised or organised enough to impose themselves; or 2) they are, in their essence, an emergency capitalist form which is made to appear when all other forms are unable to function.

Workers councils and productive forces
That the workers will take control of production. That the workers are a product of production. That production will be the product of the workers. That production is the combination of past and present labour. That if capitalist exploitation is removed from production then production and labour are liberated from capitalist exploitation. That the passage from capitalist production to social production will be facilitated by proletarian control of production. That capitalism has produced the proletariat. That the proletariat will bury capitalism. That capitalism has produced the proletariat and that the proletariat will produce the end of capitalism and the beginning of communism. That the passage into communism will be piloted by the proletariat. That the proletariat, the product of capitalism, will produce in its turn, communism. That the beginning of the next phase will be found in the end of this phase. That the essence of the next phase will be found in the accumulated techniques of this phase. That the powers inappropriately developed in this phase will be put to proper use in the next. And Hegel wrote:

Hence it is that, in the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes, for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline. This bygone mode of existence has already become an acquired possession of the general mind, which constitutes the substance of the individual, and, by thus appearing externally to him, furnishes his inorganic nature. In this respect culture or development of mind (Bildung), regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what lies at his hand ready for him, in making its inorganic nature organic to himself, and taking possession of it for himself. Looked at, however, from the side of universal mind qua general spiritual substance, culture means nothing else than that this substance gives itself its own self-consciousness, brings about its own inherent process and its own reflection into self.

It is strange, or I think it is strange, this notion of an inherited objectivity that was developed out of subjective revolt against inherited objectivity. It is strange, or I think it is strange, that the struggle to break free from inherited forms should be conceived as a developmental emergence: the bud, the blossom the fruit. I also think it is strange that after everything, that after all the myriad details of history Marx should adopt the model of primogeniture as the means for explaining the passage of one form of human society to another. The idea that much of what capitalism is, ie what Marx called the forces of production, as well as the human needs that this specific form of production presupposes, will be carried into communist society, is truly baffling. It seems not to have occurred to many who advocate self-management to consider whether the character of technological progression, a progression driven solely by the production of commodities, might cause human society, as it is realised in its needs, to regress. In other words it is not possible for the proletariat to manage all moments within the development of productive forces equally - in most situations the character of the productive forces (what they are, what they do) is in active revolt against self-management.
Given that the productive forces dictate the reproduction of the productive relations and that communist revolution is realised by the proletariat expropriating the productive forces then marxists define communist society as capitalist productive forces under workers' self management, or, as Lenin said, soviet power plus electrification. I find this conception of Marxist revolution, of the objective continuity in the accumulation of productive activity, to be an unprepossessing prospect - it is as Wellington said of Napoleon's strategic genius, 'he's just a pounder after all'. Marx is just a pounder after all.

As if there were nothing to dispute about the specific nature of the productive forces, as if the material that has been developed from alienated labour can be divided from the exploitative relation which set the process in motion, as if, even as we make the break from capitalism, we are condemned to live within the modes of existence that we have inherited from it - that we are objectively, and not merely contingently, of its lineage. The metaphors of pregnancy that Marx deployed as some sort of threat of inevitability through which capitalism's limit was set by objective social development, now come back to haunt us... it seems we cannot escape the womb of our castrating mother, our revolution is dictated by what we are in revolt against.
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Communism is not a place where meaning will rest and solutions be discovered but rather it will hold within its frame the constant and living intensity of relations which we might term as, an appropriately scaled and directed revolt against reflexive conditions.

Success, or the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. - Donald Rumsfeld

Do you not think that successful struggles within capitalism produce (however temporarily) the kind of direct social relations between people that prefigure communisation? Obviously these can't coexist in a stable way with capitalist ones, either being pushed through to communisation or dissipating as they achieve their limited goals or are defeated, but the future is not of a different dimension to the present, however much of a rupture is required to realise it.

I think the shortest response I can give is that I have at least a basic grasp of the reasons why our individual assessments of the outcomes of particular struggles never exhaust the matter, and that the reception, or recycling, of an outcome is of greater importance than the outcome itself. It is a cliché to say that success is relative but it is also true that further problematics appear from the vantage point of an achieved objective. Each breakthrough discovers another border against which it must set itself.

There are few rules set in advance by which we might predict outcomes for a potentially communisable endeavour other than that it must be commanded by a lived element (rather than say, by the unstoppable inertia of historically accumulated forces of production). We cannot say that the demand, the objective, the organisational vehicle adequately express what success might be exactly, or what it would mean to us, these elements are already given, they belong to the political vernacular when what is being felt for is that bouncing rhythmicality of the transcendent.

The prosaic framework of our demands does not at all articulate what it is that we need, which is always something other than that set by the terms of the struggle. And when we are not careful in what we pray for, as in the case of the abolition of the Poll Tax, we are humiliated by our successes, we find they are worth nothing to us. It seems, from experience, that more elaborated criteria for evaluating particular successes can only be applied with rigour retrospectively - unfortunately, we are able to understand failure within such endeavours after the event but we are not able to extrapolate from this a set of criteria for making accurate predictions about further events. The reverse is true in fact, a 'successful' demonstration for example is repeatedly restaged with less and less effect until the organisers have destroyed that bouncing spontaneity which defined the success in the first place and which they have vainly sought to recapture. As a consequence of the great variety of variables involved, all any of us with an interest in these matters can do in relation to the 'struggle', is continue as best we think fit whilst hopefully developing a subjective and communicable capacity for critical reflexivity.

However, this doesn't imply that there is nothing else to say on the matter. We can at least sketch in some of the parameters for evaluating relative successes, particularly as this is the issue under discussion here.

The question of success within a hostile environment is essentially one of adaptation (and even of exaptation, cooption and pre-adaptation). But first we must note and keep in mind a taxonomic disjunction which will influence our evaluations concerning the success of an event or project. This disjunction relates to events occurring within different scales, and may be stated simply as a rule, 'that which is significant for the group or individual is not necessarily significant for the class, but that which is significant for the class is always significant for the individual or group (although this may not be consciously recorded as such.)' In other words, none of us as individuals can really perceive in its entirety the complexity of the conditions which have created our cognitive-perceptive faculties.

Historical society is a stochastic system based upon the separation of what we as humans are consciously capable of on one side (e.g. elective, direct relations) and all the 'random' factors which thwart consciousness on the other. The nature of the relation of part to whole means that we (from the perspective of being a 'part' within the 'whole') are unable to pass final judgement on the determination of 'surface' events by shifts in underlying general relations (our inferences within this field are fraught with dangers). If success is finality, i.e. the loss of energy from a particular struggle, then it is a condition reached only by transformations occurring beyond the terms of the struggle, that is when historical conditions themselves have changed. Otherwise, as a conflict remains 'current', its status and significance is subject to multiple reversals - it may have seemed to those participating that a particular event, say the 1905 revolution, was a disaster but then later it may be viewed as, for example, 'a necessary step' (and visa versa, a perceived great success may turn out to have subsequent negative effects - the dispersing effects of the anti-poll tax or anti-CPE campaigns as examples).
Taking the definition of success you mention above as 'direct social relations that prefigure communisation' with the proviso 'obviously, these can't coexist in a stable way with capitalist ones... etc.' we understand the concept 'success' structurally to mean an event or tendency which feeds back into its environment and changes it. From this definition we can go on to identify positive successes and negative successes, the former where, as you say, a set of relations are 'pushed through to communisation', the latter being the production of unforeseen and hostile outcomes (the negative success of the situationists occurs to me as an immediate example).

Beyond the limited particularity of specific struggles, success in terms of the general social relation would be defined by a higher rate in occurrence of similarly identifiable events which presently only occur sporadically. A higher rate of discrete successes during moments of social crisis could be seen as an identifiable pattern or 'movement' particularly when they begin to feed into each other, culminating in the generation of an autonomous environment, or cycle, of successful occurrences. Evidently, such a movement would only occur when underlying conditions have themselves changed, the successes acting as an expression of the separation of events from the previous form of the relation.
But our understanding of what are, essentially, autonomous zones still founders on the (Hegelian) logical paradox of containment of smaller events by larger forces, i.e. if a local strike culminates in a 'success' then this outcome remains within a context of hostile relations - and thus still expresses the length and breadth of that relation.

Ordinarily understood, successful discrete opposition to the general conditions which gives rise to the particular forms of opposition in the first place, never exceeds the limits of those conditions. Specific manifestations of success are equally expressions of systemic success. The tension between an environment and its supported lifeforms perhaps is the main factor which ensures the health of that environment. During December 2008 Greek anarchists exploited the 1974 asylum law, which has forbidden entry to the universities by the police unless they are invited by the university authorities, in the cause of their protests. The social standing of the autonomous base nuclei that has developed on the legal framework of 'asylum' in Greece is derived from the military's attack on student occupiers of the Athens Polytechnic in 1973 when 24 students were killed. In other words, although the anarchists seem to successfully attack their conditions, this success also successfully expresses the legally defined limits of those conditions. Success, in conventional terms is always supported by the environment of which it is a product... a defined environment of available resources is able to support a greater or lesser diversity of successes in terms of lifeforms, populations, behaviours etc. and which, at all levels, always tend to optimise the resources that are available to themselves. In this way, success should be understood as an optimised relation between competing species and between the species (individually and collectively) and the environment of which they are an outcome.

The supportive environment only reaches a critical condition when a particular form of success expropriates resources beyond the ordinary limit of what is available to it. A positive feedback loop exacerbates the success of a particular outcome of an environment at the environment's expense - in this situation, the system itself behaves in such a manner that facilitates the continued uncontrolled growth of just one of its outcomes at the expense of diverse others. In the case of the Greek anarchists, a feedback runaway would have been established, that is a truly extralegal position would have been achieved, only where the supportive legal environment passed into a critical condition, thus exacerbating the revolt. Apparently, such an exacerbation is possible only where those who actively produce society withdraw their productive activity. This simultaneously adds to the destabilising factors whilst subtracting essential elements from ordinary process. If these reinforcing factors do not occur then the apparent subjective success remains within the terms and resources allocated to social dissonance by a system that retains its equilibrium in part via a defined quantity of revolt. The continued equilibrium of an environmental system is its definition of success, and this is attained by means of nourishing a proliferation in diverse 'life-forms'. Evidently, this systemic success is of a different magnitude to that of the anarchists in Athens, bear markets spirals on the stock exchanges, the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe, or the locust swarms in Australia.
At this point, we must set ourselves this question: what do we think is the historical significance of discreet examples of 'direct social relations'? If we hold to an aggregational perspective, as do many political activists, then we would argue that there must be a colonisation of the world success by success; we would also argue that struggles must be connected and that this conscious imposition of connectivity will eventually achieve a critical mass. But if we maintain an essentially Hegelian understanding (by which I mean the local is determined by the structure of the general) then all successes remain within a hostile territory and still express the depth and flexibility of the totality of the social relations of which they are a product.

As we go... Back, back and forth and forth. This is not to deny that the territory itself sometimes become fluid and that the simultaneous spontaneous appearance in many different locations of similar events and actions are the first indicators of a possible alteration in the general relation. Even so, identifying what is new and belonging on a new designed terrain will not be an easy matter when so much else is thrown up into the air simultaneously.

We are left with a structural paradox, something like a Catch 22, in order for communising acts to occur there must first be general communist relations and yet this generality has no prospect of becoming established without identifiable instances of 'communisation' undertaken by actually identifiable groups of people. Similarly, although capitalism was derived from the activity of actual human beings, the capitalist organisation of these people, and the globalised capitalist social relation always existed prior to any specific capitalist undertaking. The structure must be in place so that instances belonging to it are validated by it. Unfortunately, for those involved (and how is this for a lapse into calvinist theology?) the significance of communising undertakings, does not lie in the authenticity of the acts themselves, but in their increased generalised frequency - one hundred 'thorough' acts of communisation in one year might indicate failure whilst one hundred 'incomplete' acts in one day might indicate success.

One problem in recognising what is successful and what is not and adjusting behaviour accordingly is that aspects of communism will very often not function 'consciously' and will not appear with a 'communist' label. Many of these recalibrations of society will be directed towards the conditioning types of apperceptive capabilities including those for recognising success. A greater part of the change in relations will occur at the 'hardware' or 'latent' level of society and will not be labeled in everyday exchanges explicitly as a 'communist' practice. This is a difficult point to make, because it is assumed that communisation is synonymous with communist consciousness, with identifiable 'communist' activity and that this must translate into both a continual purposeful referencing of activities to values (declarations of intent and justification) and deliberate organising (the planned economy).

However, historically, the role of consciousness, the deliberate imposition of values on lived life, has only really existed within religiously orientated societies; otherwise social values tend to perpetuate themselves unconsciously, and through activities which seem 'natural' and autonomous of their conditioning. Therefore the dictatorship of a 'communising' consciousness is probably not necessary and would even function negatively against a genuine communising movement. Ordinarily, human interactions, although a direct product of general conditions, do not make conscious reference to those conditions... and in fact consciousness is constructed so that personal interactions and reflections on the conditioning of those interactions cannot be experienced or articulated simultaneously.

At this point, it is appropriate to mention that I am not beholden to the underlying pragmatist conception of human nature that most leftists adhere to - I am not hung up on bringing the masses to a rational evaluation of their interest. I do not accept that the proletariat lack a necessary consciousness-component or that the addition of such a component would improve the prospect of their interest if expressed in the revolutionary events that might attempt to follow the (inadequate) political outlines of such a consciousness. The implication of this is that the proletariat does not behave as the left expects it to, that is in accordance with a rationalised representation of its interest, and nor will it ever achieve that degree of subjectivity.

Although, this will seem like some late addition to the post-Kojeve framing of French intellectual life of the mid-1950's it remains the case that when we are evaluating instances of success we soon discover that we are simultaneously charting the movement of the Other, and the movement of the (big A) Other takes on very precise forms as it drifts through projects, events, organisations, causing them to fail. We can see from the operation of rationalised systems, and communism in most formulations appears as the successful implementation of a rationalised productivist system that is organised around instituted claims for use-value, that they tend to produce curiously characteristic displacements of irrationality, to give 3 mentioned examples from the news in the last week:

1. The economic dependence on intricately planned global distribution has produced lucrative opportunities for pirates who happen to be located, inopportunely for insurance companies, in Somalia (a 'failed' nation) for ease of operation in the Gulf of Aden where information concerning the highly co-ordinated movement of shipping is obviously available on the black-market.

2. The increased use of surveillance cameras in the UK perhaps 4.2million (some utilising face recognition technology) alongside harvesting technologies such as the national DNA database of 3.1 million people (the Forensic Science Service can handle 10,000 crime stain samples and 50,000 individual's dna samples per month) indicates a massive technologisation of forensic investigation. And yet this investment in forensic systems has resulted in a decline in violent crime detection from 71% in 1998/9 to 49% in 2006/7 (that is, during the very period we would expect a sharp rise in technologically driven convictions). Rationalised processing within the criminal justice industry produces strange transgressive ghosts such as the German 'woman without a face' who has according to forensic investigation left a dna trace at more than 20 scenes of theft, assault and murder, hundreds of miles apart and over a10 year period.

3. The violent death of the child legally designated 'Baby P' occurred not only under intensive scrutiny by child protection agencies but also because of active decisions that they made. This case is is an exemplar for the critique of the welfare state form, within it we find a number of systemic failures of which I will list a few. The first is stated in the principle 'everything that can go wrong must go wrong' (or Murphy's Law) but it is a characteristic of defensively designed bureaucratic structures that if every unit can malfunction individually then, at some random point, every unit will go wrong simultaneously and systemically (a negative example of transcendent bounce). Another aspect of systemic failure is a process of desensitisation to, and relativisation of, ethical values. Professional detachment shades into brutalised indifference - managers, case workers and 'clients' learn the limits of the system and play it as a game. This periodically reaches a cyclical climax in bursts of vile, and always unprecedented, irrationality. As a subset of this, tolerance levels are defined very precisely, but also rigidly, and it is easy to lose sight of the wider picture, after all, what is being 'managed' here is abuse of young people by older people.

Complex superstructures based on restrictive value systems remain fragile and are prone to radical decomposition when the underlying 'operating system' itself becomes subject to contradictions which it cannot resolve on its own terms. To conclude this, the totality of human society cannot be channeled along a royal road to 'communism' as allegorised in Mao's conceptualisation of the Long March to power. Communism is not realised by the 'successful' rationalisation of the political-economic sphere. The continuing success of any complex structure such as society cannot be reducible to a single, underlying, motive power, policy implementation, or class interest. Such a reduction, i.e communisation through state power, has always induced both a tendency to overspecialisation within the structure as well as causing a warping effect via the subsumption of multiple attributes and capacities to a single, overriding imperative.

Contrariwise, success is defined more by a capacity for diversification of modes of activity on the one hand and on an ability to adapt to as wide a set of circumstances as possible on the other. Success, as understood in the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's concept of the 'branching bush' takes its form in proliferating improvisations from out of an infinite number of practical bases. In this sense, the successfully achieved diversity of a genuine human community may never be recognised by the ideological form of communism which might be considered to be a pretty passing pity - and yet, the mere embrace of totality often indicates a tendency towards a loss of internal discipline and focus, so it can be argued that this refusal of recognition may still play a developmental role (in that it preserves a de-limited coherence as it engages as 'part' to 'whole').

My definition of success is/was the domination of a cycle/series by the lived moment as it achieves a vantage point of a for-itself existence. But now I see that perhaps success is merely the release of past lost codes... that a pure 'living activity' opposed to 'dead labour' is not the thing. That messianic time is not a rupture with what has gone before, in the sense of a separate future but rather the predicting of a different past. I am thinking of that line in Negative Dialectics, 'history is not a steam roller', Adorno at his most Benjamin-like.

Very often 'philosophy' by which I mean the abandoning of 'lines' in favour of 'fields' occurs at the point where individuals cease to adhere to an 'ism'... so it is that departures from orthodoxy become fascinating (e.g. Camatte, Foucault, Perlman, Debord, Deleuze... these are people who departed set frameworks). It is often said that anarchists grow up to become marxists but the best of the marxists grow up to rediscover, what we shall call, anarchism (an unacceptable designation but one which defines that other place beyond intellectual 'commitment' – their becoming 'honest' and the substitution of 'desire' with acceptance of, and honesty before, the big A other of systemic failure).

The critique of alienation vs. the critique of political economy

Your opponents seemed so intent on convincing the two of you otherwise (that factories cannot exist in any form whatsoever in communism), that they forgot to ask a simple yet crucial question. I am not interested in arguing for the existence of factories under communism, but your position begs the question: how exactly will we build anything in communism then?

Well, no doubt it will be some form of factory/mass production. It is not for me to say, it is a problem that must be settled at a higher organising level than individual opinion. The point is to ask this question: what is the appropriate communist response to the basic capitalist mode of accumulation and production? As far as I am concerned, it is to find fault, and problematise the totality of what currently exists rather than attempting to isolate, affirm and identify with aspects of capitalism which you agree with.

Do not forget, that the people arguing in favour of factories also argued in favour in prisons, they also argued in favour of forced medicalisation of those who refused it, they also denied any relation between the stress of modern life and the causes/exacerbation of illness.

In other words, these people do not have much of a critique of capitalism, in fact they affirm all the historical ‘objective’ forces and preserve their critique purely for the political direction, or management of, those forces. IN my opinion, the identification with contingent historic forms of the productive forces of society is an anti-proletarian ideology, it neglects, even negates people’s experience of their conversion into labour units. For them, communism is materially the same as capitalism only with a more humane form of government – although, as I have pointed out, their version of ‘humane’ is rather prescriptive and intolerant of those who disagree with it.

My argument is that because they have let go their critique of work, the� entire body of their critique of capitalism has shifted. They have ended up actually affirming the greater part of capitalism. To understand this, it is important to see what capitalism is as a social relationship rather than, say, as a system of producing things. It is important to think of it as a relation between people rather than, a process of getting jobs done, things produced etc.

If we look at the various moments in the most basic circuit of capitalism, this issue becomes clearer: (a) the conversion of life energy into labour; (b) the channeling and exploitation of labour within imposed processes; (c) the conversion of labour (representing life energy) into both (i)material things and a further abstraction into (ii) ‘Value’; (d) Value retains the life energy of human energy but in abstracted form, its power is then deployed to attract and combine further life energy so as to reproduce itself in a spiral of abstraction, condensation, precipitation.
This process is concentrated in what we recognise as factories. Yes, factories produce ‘things’ but their main purpose is to convert life energy into higher and more potent forms of abstract Value. In order to routinize or preserve this circuit of energy conversion, by which life is converted to concentrated, truncated behaviours timed in hours, measured in outputs of ‘things’, capital has to ensure the ‘factorisation’ of the entirety of life; this is called ‘proletarianisation’, or the reproduction of labour. The reproduction of labour is ensured by the conversion of life into ‘things’ which become the object and purpose of individual life. These dead things which are the output of alienated activity, because they are the object of life, literally tell us what to do; our life is governed/corrected/channeled as if we were the products on a production line and the processes of production were the most important thing in life.

If you argue that we must retain factories, you are also arguing that we retain the dictatorship by things over life. I see my role as a communist is to point this out and to problematise the smug, hostile, intolerant, progressivist accounts of human society which see this question as already settled, and which I was arguing against. The solutions are not found to the problems of human society and must be undertaken consciously, piece by piece – this ‘other’ process of setting the human at the centre of social production rather than as an adjunct to the production of things, is what I understand ‘communisation’ to mean.

I do not say I have the solutions to the factory system but, in the absence of anyone else, I will put forward the perspective derived from experience of factory conditions, the perspective based on human alienation, I will argue that the illnesses, the drudgery, the pain, the alienation are not ‘worth it’ for sake of the ‘bigger picture’. I do not say my view cancels every other view out, only that it must be taken account of. I attempt to express the human costs of factory life.

I understand that most of the people I was arguing against are white collar workers, that’s okay, that is what I am now but I also have direct experience of factory conditions, of organising with factory/manual workers and intimate experience of the health costs of factory production. My father worked 40 years in a factory, when he retired he died from a work related lung illness (idiopathic alveolitis) caused from inhaling solder fumes. His brothers have the same illness, because they worked the same lines... millions and millions of people have lived truncated, damaged, unfulfilled lives because of their employment in the factories. Sometimes in the mid-90’s my wife had to force me to go to work, we were living in such desperate conditions; I would literally cry� as I cycled miles to work at 4 in the morning. I would drink myself stupid at weekends and sleep like death only for it all to start again on Monday. Every aspect of our lives was dictated to by the miseries of work. I speak from my life experience, for all those workers who can’t face work without tranquillisers, drinking a bottle of whiskey a day, or fighting down there fear and desperation; and for those who hit their kids, who get divorced, who get to 60 somehow and then die, having achieved literally nothing as individuals. This perspective, this experience, is discounted, if we take the factory system as simply a method of ‘making things’. It is ironic, to me, that much of ‘class struggle’ politics, idealises the work system and denies the unhappiness of work.

It really is not ok to say that the misery and early death is worth it. The capitalist system, above all, is located in the exploitation of labour and the conversion of alienated life-force into abstract labour. As a communist I can only attack the process as an individual work unit (my influence is below negligible) but I am in a better position to attack the ideologies that legitimise the system, that have become habituated to the process and take it to be a second nature. As far as I am concerned communism is the transvaluation of all values, it brings everything into question, it demands that all aspects of human being are questioned, negated, altered, re-valued. There is nothing belonging to now that is not infected with the problems of now, therefore everything must be challenged and then challenged again. I will not accept a progressivist/cumulative account of history because that severs my connection, my humanity, from all the human beings who have suffered and died as a result of capitalist process.

As a communist I put actual human experience, and experience is synonymous with shock and pain, at the forefront of my project. I want to articulate it and I want it to be addressed. I would suggest that lived experience rather than ‘solutions’ or processes ought to be the main frame of reference for communist engagement with proletarianisation. Others will take another view and these different perspectives are combined socially at a much higher level than individual opinion but I will fight as best I can for the ‘for-human’ approach to communism and against the tendency to emphasise process which occurs elsewhere within our milieu.

The abandonment of the critique of alienation and the fetishisation of Germanist objectivist/economist categories
Here is a whole different transformation problem to grapple with: the critique of political economy does not precipitate any particular set of politics because it is no more than an interpretive tool for understanding political economy. As Redtwister/Chris has said elsewhere, the critique of political economy is not a critique of the capitalist social relation; the former is an analytic/interpretive method, the latter is a political intervention aimed at the totality of human life in the present. There is no necessary connection between the two and furthermore opposition to capitalism does not require grounding in the exegesis of overly-valued texts.� �

It is clear that marxism has produced a small number of useful interpretive tools for the better understanding of contingent aspects of human society (although the predictive capacity of these tools is extremely limited) however, the political interventions and organisational attempts supposedly derived from this interpretive method have signally failed – primarily because, in my opinion, they do not accurately locate the essence of human existence, which is not labour but ambivalence.
If it is true that anarchists grow up to become marxists, it seems this urge to read Marx is only a pseudo-maturation, by contrast the most interesting marxist politics only really achieve authentic maturity when they discover the limitations of their orthodox framework and must depart them (Perlman is a case in point).�
Perhaps an alternative to the proposed pamphlet would be entitled Anarchism for Marx; the strength of anarchism is its under-theoretisation, i.e. its escape from the German Idealist categories which dominate marxism.� Anarchism, or rather, true anarchism (lets say, insurrectionism, primitivism) maintains its critique of capitalism at the level of intuitive consciousness of alienation from the position of actually lived experience. By contrast, the critique of alienation is almost entirely lost from organisationalist anarchism precisely because of its cross-fertilisation with crude marxism, in fact, class struggle organisationalist anarchism, to the degree that it has adopted crude marxist economist categories, has given up its critique of the capitalist social relation altogether – developing instead a progressivist, forces of production argument filtered through an ideology of self-management.

...The supposed maturity that rebels accede to when they read Marx is in reality an indicator of their stepping back from the critique of capitalism, a coming to terms, a truce with the forces that first produced their alienation.

On the reduction of the rate of exploitation
If the discourse of the critique of alienation is abandoned, all that is left for communists is a discourse based upon the proposal of a reduction in the rate of exploitation of labour – and such relativistic formulations are not the stuff of communism at all.�
The identification of communism with the objective continuity of the forces of production is a gambit based upon an a priori and unexamined assumption concerning the objectively acceptable rate of exploitation of labour.

Within the capitalist mode of production the rate of exploitation is considered currently too high but nonetheless this has produced a benefit in the form of the material accumulation of dead labour which, under different managerial direction could facilitate an objective reduction in the rate of exploitation.

This reduction of the rate of exploitation by dead things of living activity is called self-management.

That communism itself is synonymous with a relatively reduced rate of exploitation of the proletariat within the productive relation.
The material base of the commodity relation, it is foreseen, may be simply disconnected from commodity production itself through, what is in effect, a change of government.

The relationship of the proletariat to production is essentially continuous from capitalism to communism but is ameliorated, mitigated, recognised. Effectively, the fetish of the commodity is replaced by the fetish of labour which achieves the actualisation of its role in production – labour does not alter its character so much as it is no longer obscured by mediating ‘things’ – work is not abolished so much as institutionalised as Value.

However, the experience of the worker within instrumentalist-communism would remain unchanged, the basic, immediate sense of alienation that he had felt in capitalism would go unchallenged in communism – except to say that he would have become his own alienator.

If it is decided to run the factories ‘communistically’ then it is decided that capitalism is immediately abolished. That is, the rate of exploitation is immediately reduced to an acceptable level, despite the proletariat continuing to undertake exactly the same tasks.

The worker would continue to be dictated to by the needs of the processes that were first organised by commodity production and which materially express the fetish character of the productive relation... within this understanding, the greater part of capitalism goes unopposed, on the contrary, the objective developments of capitalism are understood positively and the question set by instrumentalist-communists only concerns the re-direction of the means of production towards ‘social’ needs.

ANARCHISM AND POSTMODERNISM: Interview with Lucien van der Walt

2010-02-04T13:06:00.000-08:00

RICHARD ESTES: Let me ask you one last question; it may be an overly theoretical question, so feel free to be, you know, dismissive of it. But it comes to mind in light of the remarks you just made. One of the things I tend to encounter quite frequently is this tendency among what I would call, I guess, the Marxist-Leninist and parliamentary socialist left to ascribe a lot of the current problems, politically, that they experience to postmodernism, which they seem to broadly define as this sort of excessive relativisation of class and culture to the point where there is no such thing as a meaningful class or cultural identity, or they’re all the same, which I personally believe is a gross distortion of postmodernism from my own readings. But, in any event, they seem to be ascribing a great deal of blame to it in terms of their own predicament, and really criticizing it quite severely. While, as you’ve noted, anarchism seems to have thrived, it seems to have done quite well, during this very same postmodern period. So, I guess my question is: Do anarchists really share this perspective that more parliamentary socialist and Marxist-Leninists have about postmodernism? Or do they relate to it in an entirely different way?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Well, I think there’s two things here.

The one is that one of the strengths of postmodernism is its focus on a more open-ended view of society and a more open-ended view of history. If you look at classical Marxist-Leninism it ended up with a very, very mechanical, narrow, reductionist view of how things work, to the extent you could virtually read off people’s identities solely from their occupation, and their political views solely from their source of income. So that’s a strength, and I think anarchists would appreciate that…in that anarchism is a much more open model, although it makes class central, it’s a much more open than a Marxist model.

However, I do think that anarchism, historically, was very much a movement, a modernist movement that stressed rationalism, that stressed conscious human control of events, one that did see things as having a fixity, as having a stability, as having a pattern and a purpose far beyond anything that postmodernism would conceive. So, I would certainly say that someone like Bakunin or Kropotkin would be very, very critical of postmodern relativism.

On the one hand, it’s also very, very moralistic actually, anarchism. It stresses morals. I’m not saying “moralistic” in a bad sense. On the other hand, it’s very much enamoured of the idea of rationality as a tool to change society.

RICHARD ESTES: Well, LUCIEN VAN DER WALT, we really appreciate you making this time available to us today, and if people are interested in the book, it’s entitled Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. It’s available through AK Press so you can check out akpress.org to find out more about it.

Full Interview at: http://anarkismo.net/article/15462

Michel Onfray: Postanarchism explained to your grandmother

2010-01-02T22:30:00.000-08:00

According to a recent addition to wikipedia: "Recently, the french hedonist philosopher Michel Onfray has embraced the term postanarchism to describe his approach to politics and ethics. He advocates for an anarchism in line with such intellectuals as 'Orwell, Simone Weil, Jean Grenier, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Guattari, Lyotard, Derrida and theorists of May 1968' which for him was 'a nietzschetian revolt in order to put an end to the One truth, revealed, an to put in evidence the diversity of truths, in order to make disappear ascetic christian ideas and to help arise new possibilities of existence"

Here is a rough babelfish translation of a news piece from www.maglm.fr. I take full responsibility for any errors in translation. For more information on Michel Onfray see his wikipedia page here.

Postanarchism Explained to Your Grandmother

Last Thursday, the Renaud-Barrault room of the theatre of the Roundabout was full. Michel Onfray gave an conference presentation called "Postanarchism explained to my grandmother". Onfray made fun of the popular books of postanarchist thought and the history of ideas that ntellectuals make regularly with few expenses; addressing adult readers as they would do to children.

Rejecting this kind of simplistic step, Michel Onfray, in the spirit of the Popular university of Caen, intends to revisit the history of anarchistic thought--multiplicitous and contradictory though it may be--by asserting a right of inventory: to retain the ideas which still seem to him of value today and to push back the unacceptable and/or considerably dated standpoint.

While following this logic, the author of Contre histoire de la philosophi (Against a history of philosophy) traces the contours of postanarchism, a current which also exists on the other side of the Atlantic. It starts by sweeping without care a certain number of dogmas (one of its great businesses) of anarchistic thought: the rejection of State; the refusal of elections; the idea according to which capitalism would be overcome in a cataclysmic unfolding on a global scale. On the contrary, for the philosopher, the State is useful, to vote makes it possible to express a power struggle and capitalism is the substantial shape of the world - it is only liberal capitalism which is to be denounced.

Michel Onfray then moved onto a screening of the writings of authors known as anarchistic to make his statement: exit stage the positions of warmongers, homophobes and the male chauvinist pigs of Proudhon, and say yes to pragmatism; exit stage the Christianity of Tolstoï and the negativity of those which became anarchistic by bitterness; and say yes to positivity, and with all that which is likely to develop the life instinct; yes in the place of the Justice defended by Louise Michel, with the categorical imperative of Boétie -- "Be solved not to be useful more and you will be free" -- reactivated by Thoreau, with the phalansteries of Furrier, the anarcho-syndicalism of Albert Camus in The Revolted man, with education, the pleasures of the body, etc.

If the anarchistic thought were bled by the Commune then by the War of 14-18, before the triumph of the Marxism, the author thinks that anarchism for a time disappeared in the sea and then reappeared. He regards May 1968 as a Nietzschean revolt which put an end to the Truth by highlighting the diversity of multiple truths, and erasing the Christian ascetic ideals thereby marking the emergence of new possibilities for existence.

Michel Onfray proposes a post-anarchism for the past; for today and for tomorrow.

Post-Anarchism at NAASN

2009-12-10T16:27:00.000-08:00

Michael Truscello has graciously provided us with an audio copy of the panel "Visions of Post-Anarchism" from the first ever North American Anarchist Studies Conference. Panelists included Michael Truscello and Thomas Nail. For more information (bios) please visit the website.

Audio File: Visions of Post-Anarchism

Thanks for the file. The presentations and discussions were excellent and insightful. Both speakers have chapters in the book "Postanarchism: A Reader", forthcoming 2010 from Pluto Press.

Saul Newman: Postanarchism between Politics and Anti-Politics

2009-11-06T02:44:00.000-08:00

I would like to share a string of videos of a Saul Newman talk from Sept 2 - 4 at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. ~~I would also like to apologize that many of these posts are exceedingly long. I am working on hacking the blogspot template to allow for a "Read More" link.~~ Enjoy.

Post-Anarchism at NAASN

2009-11-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

Please join us at the first ever North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference. Our panel is called "Visions of Post-Anarchism":

Roger Farr, Michael Truscello, Thomas Nail, (Duane Rousselle)

In a yet to be released essay from Lewis Call (author of “Postmodern Anarchism”, Lexington Books, 2002), it is argued that a sort-of “post-anarchist” moment has finally arrived (Post-Anarchism: A Reader, forthcoming) and yet equally, there appears to be growing sentiment that the post-anarchist critique has been somewhat internalized in the minds of many anarchist researchers and therefore rendered stagnant as an independent position that one can argue either 'for' or 'against'. What is the place of post-anarchism today? Can it still be defined largely by its critique of traditional anarchism or are there other ways of interpreting it? Have we possibly moved beyond post-anarchism and, if so, does it continue to cast a shadow on the way we study anarchism? This panel begins with three paper presentations on particular post-anarchist interventions and then moves into a discussion on their points of connection and difference (between the panelists and the participating audience). The Visions of Post-anarchism panel represents an attempt to outline what post-anarchism means for anarchist researchers today and what it may mean tomorrow.

Individual paper outlines follow:

Michael Truscello will examine the concept of necessity as a reference to the means by which revolutionaries could survive in the context of continuing revolution. This meaning of necessity divided the earliest socialists and anarchists. As Murray Bookchin writes, “The problem of dealing with want and work—an age-old problem perpetuated by the early Industrial Revolution—produced the great divergence in revolutionary ideas between socialism and anarchism. Freedom would still be circumscribed by necessity in the event of a revolution. How was this world of necessity to be 'administered'? (2004: 46). Marxists proposed the state as the means by which necessity could be administered and revolution could persist, and anarchists offered the solution of free communities (Bookchin, 2004: 46). “The problem of want and work,” writes Bookchin, “was never satisfactorily resolved by either body of doctrine in the last century" (2004: 47). Bookchin's own solution was "social ecology," which required technology to "replace the realm of necessity by the realm of freedom" (2004: 48), a proposal met with derision by anarcho-primitivists. The problem of necessity in the period of late capitalism is intimately bound to the problem of technology, since most people who live in industrial societies depend on massive technological systems for sustenance, and since the current population of the planet greatly surpasses the number that could be supported by living as hunter-gatherer societies, the primitivist ideal. To revolt against these technological systems from within industrial societies would seem to be an act of self-destruction; to preserve these systems would be equal folly. For anarchists, the problem of the technological society therefore necessitates a paradoxical solution. I will discuss the possibility that this paradoxical solution might resemble Saul Newman's concept of "unstable universalities."

Thomas Nail argues that poststructuralist philosophy, anarchism, and radical politics share a similar commitment against statism, capitalism vanguardism, and economic reductionism, but share an ambivalence toward more positive visions of today's radical and anarchist organizations. If, following Todd May, one understands post-anarchism as the dual commitment to “anti-authoritarianism” and the “affirmation of difference,” how are we to understand the concrete consistency of political experimentations beyond their mere potentiality to “become different than they are.” That is, what would a post-anarchist political analysis look like took seriously the concrete analysis of specific anarchist practices and their organization? In this paper I argue that while anti-authoritarianism and potentiality are crucial for understanding the core of radical politics today, they are ultimately insufficient for understanding the consistency and organization of today’s actual alternatives to capitalism and domination. What I will begin to develop in this paper instead is a vision of post- anarchism amended by a philosophical constructivism of the concrete conditions, elements, and agencies that compose post-anarchist political experimentations. In particular I will exemplify this analysis in the case of one of the first post-anarchist revolutions: Zapatismo.

Roger Farr investigates the increasingly common demands in various anarchist periodicals for greater clarity and accessibility in movement discourse. A recent issue of Rolling Thunder, for instance, argues that the “exclusive language” of certain milieus is unable to “make a welcoming space for a broad range of participants,” and that these “obscurantists” should rather express themselves “in the language they use when they talk with their neighbors or relatives.” While debates around language use have been, and continue to be, critically important for anarchists, we need to move beyond the “clarity good / jargon bad” binary that too frequently provides a structure for the discussion, which in the end usually leads to vague indictments of “in-group” languages and “exclusionary” linguistic practices, in favour of what sounds very much like a call for even more anonymous, mass communication. Drawing on Alice Becker-Ho’s work on argot – “the language of the dangerous classes” – this talk asks what anarchists might learn from the study of such “anti-languages,” and argues that in the struggle over our language we arrive at “the heart of all the struggles between the forces striving to abolish the present alienation and those striving to maintain it.”

Duane will provide an overview at the end and stimulate discussion.

Biographies:

Roger is the author of a book of poetry, SURPLUS (Line Books, 2006), a contributor to the co-research project N 49 19. 47 - W 123 8.11 (Recomposition, 2008), and is the editor of the sporadically published journal PARSER: New Poetry and Poetics. His writing on social movements and the avant-garde has appeared or is forthcoming in Anarchist Studies, Fifth Estate, Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, The Poetic Front, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. His critical introduction to a new English translation of Alice Becker-Ho’s The Essence of Jargon is forthcoming from Autonomedia. He teaches in the Creative Writing and Culture and Technology Programs at Capilano University in Vancouver, BC.

Michael is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. His work has focused on the postanarchist politics of digital culture (especially software), and has been featured in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Technical Communication Quarterly, and TEXT Technology.

Thomas is a visiting scholar at CERIS—The Ontario Metropolis Centre in Toronto, Canada. He has written on the post-structuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Alain Badiou. Awarded a U.S. Fulbright scholarship to complete his dissertation in Canada, he is currently writing his Ph.D in philosophy (University of Oregon) on the concept of revolution in the political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. He was the assistant editor for the journal, Environmental Philosophy 5:2 (2008) and 6:1 (2009).

Duane is embarrassingly undecided. He is the editor of the forthcoming book “Post-Anarchism: A Reader” and a decidedly excommunicated anarchist.

Post-Anarchism: A Reader [updated!]

2009-10-24T16:09:00.001-07:00

Despite many obstacles, the Post-Anarchism Reader project continues (I will address these obstacles both in the book and on this blog in the future). Although I have had a contract on my desk for the last few months, I feel that it is more important to continue to negotiate with Pluto Press at this time [you may note that Pluto published Uri Gordon's Anarchy Alive! (2007), Richard Day's Gramsci is Dead (2005), John Moore and Spencer Sunshine's edited volume I am not a man, I am dynamite! (2004), Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone (2004), John Holloway's Change the world without taking power (2005), Daniel Singer's Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (2003), Joanne Richardson's Anarchitexts.] The latest update, from Pluto, is that all three peer reviews came back positive (very positive), I have responded to them and await a full decision in the very near future. For now, I hope that the table of contents is at least somewhat useful/interesting to you folks.

Preface - Duane Rousselle
Introduction - Sureyyya Evren

I - Anarchism After Post-structuralism/Post-Modernism
May, Todd -Is post-structuralist political theory anarchist?
Koch, Andrew - Post-structuralism and the epistemological basis of anarchism
Bey, Hakim - Post-anarchism anarchy
Newman, Saul - Anarchism, Marxism and the bonapartist state
de Rota, Antón Fernendez - Acracy_Reloaded@post1968/1989: Reflections on Postmodern Revolutions

II - Movements
Day, Richard J.F. - From hegemony to affinity
Mueller, Tadzio - Empowering anarchy: Power, hegemony, and anarchist strategy
Adams, Jason - The constellation of oppositions
Truscello, Michael - Imperfect necessity and the mechanical continuation of everyday life: A postanarchist politics of technology

III - Reactions
Cohn, Jesse., & Wilbur, Shawn - What’s wrong with postanarchism
Franks, Benjamin - Postanarchism: A partial account
Jeppesen, Sandra - Things to do with post-structuralism in a life of anarchy: Relocating the outpost of post-anarchism
Saint Schmidt - Postanarchism is not what you think: The role of postanarchist theory after the backlash

IV - Lines of Flight
Heckert, Jamie - Sexuality as state-form
Bertalan, Hilton - Emma Goldman: The postanarchist
Farr, Roger - Anarchist Poetics
Call, Lewis - Buffy the Post-Anarchist Vampire Slayer

V – The Future of Radical Politics
de Acosta, Alejandro - Anarchist Meditations, or: Three Wild Interstices of Anarchism and Philosophy
Nail, Thomas - Constructivism and the future anterior of radical politics
Evren, Sureyyya - Currently Untitled
Newman, Saul - Postanarchism and radical politics today

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index

Special issue of Critical Horizons on Simon Critchley's Neo-Anarchism

2009-09-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory
Editor(s): Jay M. Bernstein, Emmanuel Renault, John Rundell
Print ISSN: 1440-9917
Online ISSN: 1568-5160
Institutional Price (Print and Online): £110.00
Individual Price: £30.00

VOLUME 10 (2009) ISSUE 2

**SPECIAL ISSUE**
Ethics of Commitment and Politics of Resistance:
Simon Critchley’s Neo-Anarchism
Edited by Robert Sinnerbrink and Philip A. Quadrio

Contents

Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance: Simon Critchley’s
Infinitely Demanding
Robert Sinnerbrink and Philip A. Quadrio

On Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment,
Politics of Resistance
Alain Badiou

Neo-Anarchism or Neo-Liberalism? Yes, Please! A Response to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Robert Sinnerbrink

“Critchley is Zizek”: In Defence of Critical Political Philosophy
Matthew Sharpe

The Common Root of Commitment, Resistance and Power
Karin de Boer

Speaking to the People: Critchley, Rousseau and the Deficit in Practical Rationality
Philip A. Quadrio

Which Anarchism? On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Infinity for (Political) Life: A Response to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Nina Power

A Plea for Prometheus
Alberto Toscano

Humorous Commitments and Non-Violent Politics: A Response
to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Fiona Jenkins

Mystical Anarchism
Simon Critchley

Imperceptible Strategies, Unidentified Autonomous Organizations

2009-09-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

:: A Drifting Seminar :: London, October 23rd,2009 ::

Anarchist and autonomous politics are often associated, in a kneejerk way, with a celebration of chaos and disorder: a rejection of all forms of organization. The reduction of radical politics to a cheap joke (‘anarchist organization, what’s that?’) comes to substitute for an actual understanding of autonomous organizational practices. Far from rejecting organization all together, the history of autonomous politics contains a wealth of different modes of organizing, from the formation of temporary autonomous zones to affinity group models, maroon communities to networks and collectives.

These are forms of organizing that not always acknowledged as being organizations because they do not conform to what it is assumed organizations necessarily are: durable, static, and hierarchical. This understanding of organization obscures and makes difficult an actual engagement with the merits and weaknesses of different forms of organizing. But what would be found if rather than working from a fixed and unchanging concept of organization, one that excludes temporary forms of organization from consideration, it was attempted to tease out the organizational dynamics from all the temporary alliances and alliances that appear and disappear?

Might it be possible that we are already enmeshed in a world of unidentified autonomous organizations, a milieu of potential liberation that has remained imperceptible because of a narrow understanding of what organizations are? And might it not be that this imperceptibly, rather than being a condition to be addressed as a problem, could rather be part of building of what Robin D.G. Kelley calls an infrapolitical sphere: a space for politics coming out of people’s everyday experiences that do not express themselves as radical political organization at all.

The aim of this encounter is to explore the connections between anarchism, autonomism, and the revolutions of everyday life, drawing out conceptual tools useful to developing and deepening the politics of these infrapolitical spaces and organization. How can we strategize and build from the connections and movements of the undercommons, working from everyday encounters to compose new forms of social movement? How can we connect and work between spontaneous forms of resistance without forcing them into some larger form that ossifies them?

This event will not be based around formal presentations, but rather will rather take the form of a drifting seminar. Participants will be asked to read several pieces of text that will form the basis of discussion and exploration.

Registration for the event will be approximately 10 quid. There will be some limited travel funding available. If you wish to be considered for this funding indicate this when you register.

For registration and information contact: stevphen [NO SPAM] autonomedia [DOT] org / Sponsored by the Anarchist Studies Network & Minor Compositions

Sponsored by the Anarchist Studies Network (www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk) & Minor Compositions (www.minorcompositions.info).

SCHEDULE:
To be posted shortly. Begins at 12pm outside Pogo Café in Hackney.

READINGS:
Roger Farr (2007) “The Strategy of Concealment.”
Stefano Harney (2008) “Governance and the Undercommons.”
The Invisible Committee (2007) The Coming Insurrection.
Dimitris Papadopoulos (2006) “Who’s Afraid of Immaterial Workers? Embodied Capitalism, Precarity, Imperceptibility.”
Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos (2008) Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century. London: Pluto Press.

Anarca-Islam

2009-09-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

"As an anarchist and a Muslim, I have witnessed troubled times as a result of extreme divisions that exist between these two identities and communities. To minimize these divisions, I argue for an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian Islam, an ‘anarca-Islam’, that disrupts two commonly held beliefs: one, that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; two, that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious. From this position I offer ‘anarca-Islam’ which I believe can help open-minded (non-essentialist/non-dogmatic) Muslims and anarchists to better understand each other, and therefore to more effectively collaborate in the context of what Richard JF Day has called the ’newest’ social movements. [..] In light of anarchism’s identification as a pluralistic tradition, it follows that Anarca-Islam is an Islamic reinterpretation of anarchism, and more particularly post-anarchism." --Mohamed Jean-Veneuse

Read Mohamed's M.A Thesis At the Anarchist Library (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/anarca-islam)

CFP: First North American Anarchist Network Conference

2009-09-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

The 1st North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference

Association Nord-Américain des Etudes Anarchistes

Asociación Norteamericana de Estudios Anarquistas

When: November 21st and 22nd, 2009

Where: Hartford, Connecticut USA: at Charter Oak Cultural Center (21 Charter Oak Ave.)

We are pleased to announce the beginning of the North American Anarchist Studies Network (NAASN). We see this as a space to develop theoretical and empirical work that pays critical attention to anarchism and items of interest to the anarchist milieu. Likewise, we see the creation of this network as a way for North American anarchists who do scholarly work to be able to support each other in our endeavors and create a space for critical dialogue and reflection.

This conference, then, is not only a place for us to discuss our research, dialogue with one another in panels, and educate ourselves through presentations. It is also a place for discussing the development and future course of the NAASN–so if you would like to be involved, please do so! As well, this provides us with a venue for discussing the role of the theoretician and the researcher in the larger project of dismantling capitalism, the state, and domination in all of its forms.

We are calling for papers, panels, and presentations to be given at the founding conference. Creativity in format and presentation is encouraged, as are submissions from people who may not currently have a university affiliation. As anarchists, we want to disrupt rather than perpetuate the lines drawn between the official academy and the production of knowledge. Papers, panels, and presentations should focus on work on anarchism or topics of interest to the anarchist milieu. Importantly, we see this as an occasion for dialoguing with one another to learn and grow, and would like to avoid sectarianism, personal attacks, and debating-to-win.

Please send proposals and/or abstracts with a brief bio to the conference organizers: Jesse Cohn, Luis Fernandez, Nathan Jun, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Willis at anarchiststudies@hotmail.com . Please keep descriptions and/or abstracts under 500 words. All proposals and abstracts are due by October 10, 2009. Likewise, vendors and organizations may email us at the above address to arrange for table space.

For a new world, free of institutionalized coercion and control! And for a present living and organizing in ways that embody that future as best we can!

The Organizers for the 1st North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference

For up-to-date information, please visit: http://naasn.wordpress.com

New Book: New Perspectives on Anarchism

2009-08-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

NEW BOOK

New Perspectives on Anarchism
Edited by Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl

New Perspectives on Anarchism is not only timely, but an important testament to the growing importance of anarchist thought in our era. The book contains crisp ideas that analyze anarchism from multiple perspectives. Like all good books, this volume does not contain a set of prescribed concepts or stilted dogma. Rather, expect a sea of sharp critiques, all revolving around issues of equality, freedom, power, and justice.—Luis A. Fernandez, author of Policing Dissent and co-editor of Contemporary Anarchist Studies

The study of anarchism as a philosophical, political, and social movement has burgeoned both in the academy and in the global activist community in recent years. Taking advantage of this boom in anarchist scholarship, Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl have compiled twenty-six cutting-edge essays on this timely topic in New Perspectives on Anarchism. This collection of essays is unique in its global and multi-cultural scope, as its contributors hail from across the globe.

The scholars and activists featured in New Perspectives on Anarchism view anarchism from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, political science, religion, sociology, and ecology. Together, they attest to the vibrancy, intrepidity, and diversity of contemporary anarchist studies both within and without the academy. New Perspectives on Anarchism's broad approach to anarchism will make it appealing to scholars and political activists from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

List of Contributors
Samantha E. Bankston, Harold Barclay, Lewis Call, Alexandre J.M.E. Christoyannopolous, Vernon Cisney, Jesse Cohn, Abraham DeLeon, Francis Dupuis-Déri, Benjamin Franks, Clive Gabay, Karen Goaman, Rodrigo Gomes Guimarães, Uri Gordan, James Horrox, Anthony Ince, Sandra Jeppesen, Stavros Karageorgakis, Elizabeth Kolovou, Thomas Martin, Todd May, Nicolae Morar, Irene Pereira, Stevphen Shukaitis, Mick Smith, Scott Turner, Salvo Vaccaro, Mitchell Verter, Dana Ward, and Dana M. Williams.

About the Authors & Editors:
Nathan J. Jun is assistant professor of philosophy and coordinator of the philosophy program at Midwestern State University.

Shane Wahl is an instructor in philosophy at Ivy Tech Community College and teaches philosophy and debate to gifted children through Purdue University's Gifted Education Resource Institute.

$95.00 | Cloth | 0-7391-3240-

7 | 978-0-7391-3240-1 | Jul 2009 | 456 pp.
$42.95 | Paper | 0-7391-3241-5 | 978-0-7391-3241-8 | Jul 2009 | 456 pp.

For more information and to order, click here.

Accursed Anarchism: Five Post-Anarchist Meditations on Bataille

2009-07-20T23:04:00.001-07:00

"I am myself a war" --Georges Bataille

Any inquiry into the nature of Georges Bataille's troublesome relationship with Marxism appears to me to be a matter of banality expressed through the hysterical (or worse, university) discourses inhabited by those who would not dare probe the traumatic nature of Bataille's commitment to sovereignty[1]; in any case, this vexing relationship is by now a matter of common knowledge and it proves useless if one is truly interested in the exploratory and transformative practices associated with philosophical meditation.[2] Likewise, recent attempts to situate Bataille as the to-finally-be-discovered father-figure of a distinctly post-structuralist/post-modernist lineage have not been met by deaf ears nor by idle pens (c.f. Dorfman, 2002);[3] for instance, not long after Bataille's death Tel Quel—an avant-garde literary journal operating out of Paris at the time—had incisively granted Bataille this very appropriate distinction – the irony of which becomes exposed as the occurrence preceded the popularization of structuralist thought itself (Botting & Wilson, 1991: 5-7, esp. pg 6). What remains to be excavated from Bataille's texts, however, is the nature of his commitment to that proud adversary of Marxist thought: anarchism. This venture resolves itself into two interrelated questions: (1) how might a contemporary anarchist read into Bataille's work? and (2) how might Bataille read into traditional anarchism and how might this reading inform contemporary anarchist philosophy?

Read more: http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/8602

Primitivism, post-Modernism, Chomsky and anarchism

2009-05-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

Source: http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/7658

There are those who want to popularize anarchist ideas, and then there are those that want to radicalize them. The post-modern anarchists, not unlike the primitivists, are, of course, going to be dismissed by the former group of thinkers who are nothing more than bent on tradition. What is truly interesting, however, is why, afterall, Purchase believes it worth discussing the so-called popularity among radical intellectuals of dismissing the working class while, in the same breath, admitting that these post-modern anarchists are just a very small group. He has mixed up the description of post-modern anarchism with the advocacy of it. What is more ironic is that the book does not tackle, in any way, post-modern anarchism. Why does Purchase feel the need to include them?

"The dismissal of the working classes is currently popular among "radical" intellectuals. Some of the stupidest political ideas and outlooks maybe found among primitivists (back-to-the caves) and post-modernists. A few individuals mistakenly believe themselves to be avant garde anarchist thinkers or philosophers. Post-modern `anarchists' (a tiny clique embedded in the academy) believe class analysis is passé and the working classes largely irrelevant and/or virtually non-existent. Primitivists believe workers exist but are just human robots within our evil industrial-technological civilization, which will end with our return to the caves. Quizzed about his views on such nonsense, Chomsky sensibly replies that "post Modernism is gibberish" (216), and primitivism would entail "the mass genocide of millions" (226). For Chomsky, "technology is a pretty neutral instrument," utilizable for both good and evil ends. (225) He dismisses the post-modernist denial of "fundamental class differences." He hasn't "much problem in discerning class differences and their significance. In fact we see class issues rising all the time." (228)"

(read more)

Postanarchism is not what you think: The role of postanarchist theory after the backlash

2009-05-06T19:52:00.000-07:00

Postanarchism, according to Rousselle, “has never received the amount of attention or sympathy that it deserved from the radical community at large” (infoshop, 2007). He continues, “Part of the reluctance, I suspect, results from the empty spaces occupying the bookshelves of universities, alternative bookstores and radical lending libraries across the world today” (ibid.). However, the reception of postanarchist theory, I would suggest, is hindered less by the problems associated with its propaganda than with a fundamental misunderstanding, on the part of its critics (in particular: Antliff, 2007; Cohn & Wilbur, 2003; Cohn, 2002; Day, 2005; Franks, 2007; Sasha K, 2004; Zabalaza, 2003) of what the postanarchists’ claims have been. This tension has hindered further dialogue and clarification on the key issues raised in the postanarchist writings and has erected a barrier which can only be dislodged through a careful and attentive investigation into the way in which the debate has played out on both sides of the fence. Judgement must be reserved on the basis of whether the resulting demarcations are worth retaining or abandoning.

(read more)

Anarchist Germinations - DesertEgo

2009-04-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

(For Full Text: http://affinityproject.org/documents/germinations.pdf)

"This is an attempt to offer anarchists a tactical analysis of two barriers to germinations. It takes a poststructuralist approach to the academic analysis of social movements, like that considered by Todd May in his book, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (1994)."

This article was posted anonymously on a facebook account. Although I would argue that the overall approach falls somewhere outside of postanarchist concerns, others might disagree with me and find value in it.

Internal bleeding: the possible causes of Ian Tomlinson's death

2009-04-18T15:23:00.000-07:00

From The Guardian:

Massive internal bleeding, which is now being blamed for Ian Tomlinson's death, can be triggered by someone being assaulted or simply falling over, according to a senior emergency medicine doctor.

Dr Charles O'Donnell, a consultant in emergency and intensive care medicine at Whipps Cross hospital in east London, said a person could have an abdominal haemorrhage as the result of suffering some kind of trauma.

"An abdominal haemorrhage is a fairly common occurrence as a result of a blunt injury, such as a road traffic accident, fall or assault," he said. "Most people who have trauma don't have [such] problems. But among people who have trauma, a small percentage will have life-threatening bleeding. It would not be common for someone to die from an abdominal haemorrhage in response to a simple fall, but it's not unknown. It can happen, but it's rare."

Consultant forensic pathologist Dr Nat Cary's new postmortem report states that, while Tomlinson's cause of death was abdominal bleeding, it was still unclear what led to that haemorrhage. O'Donnell said that the many potential reasons for it included someone having a liver that was already diseased, through heavy drinking, an infection or problem with the body's immune system. Liver disease causes problems by interfering with the person's ability to clot and stop their bleeding. "Something that wouldn't be a problem in the rest of us can be a problem in such patients," he said.

Trauma can also produce an abdominal haemorrhage - serious bleeding around organs such as the liver, spleen, intestine and bladder - by causing a large, solid organ to bleed, O'Donnell added. "That can lead to the person possibly dying or having a major haemorrhage which requires an urgent blood transfusion," he said.

The doctor who conducted the first, disputed postmortem on Tomlinson, Dr Freddy Patel, said he found that his heart and liver were diseased.

The New Face of Political Cinema: COmmitment in French Film Since 1995

2009-04-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/128346019 (Retrieved April 16th, 2009)

By Buchsbaum, Jonathan

The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film Since 1995 by Martin O'Shaughnessy. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. 195 pp. Hardcover: $80.00. Before 1968, debates concerning politics and film in France were usually conducted in the film journal Positif. The more famous Cahiers du cinema had championed a "politique des auteurs," which had little to do with politics. That changed in 1968, when Cahiers moved radically left, profoundly influenced by intellectuals such as the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In his new book, Martin O'Shaughnessy, a professor of film at Nottingham Trent University in England, tries to limn a recent "paradigm shift in the mode of appearance of social struggle in French cinema" since the concerted efforts of Cahiers to articulate a theory and criticism of political film.

O'Shaughnessy poses the central question of how films can formulate political critiques after the collapse of the grand leftist narrative(s) of the twentieth century. The book contests the analysis staked out by Cahiers after 1968, which he finds still regnant at Cahiers almost forty later. In so doing, the book uses a corpus of some fifty films made by roughly forty filmmakers. Some will be familiar to readers in this country (Laurent Cantet, Claude Chabrol, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Robert Guediguian, Bruno Dumont, Bertrand Tavernier), others less so (Laetitia Masson, Herve le Roux, Dominique Cabrera, Christian Vincent).

O'Shaughnessy chooses to begin his analysis in 1995, not only because of the release of new political films after that moment, but also because of the large protests mounted in France in that year against the government's attempts to reform social security benefits in the public sector. Filmmakers joined that movement, and subsequently led resistance on other fronts as well, notably the undocumented immigrants (the sans papiers), and part-time cultural workers, known as the intermittents du spectacle.

New political filmmaking, then, appeared as part of that resistance, and O'Shaughnessy wants to demonstrate the inadequacy of the old Cahiers schema, but more significantly, to proffer a new analysis that will recognize the value of contemporary political films that models inherited and adapted from the earlier Cahiers era dismiss. Cahiers continues to privilege films that not only engage clearly political issues, such as strikes, but also interrogate cinematic form (the Dziga Vertov group's Tout va bien, 1972, is a favored example). Films that adopt conventional forms cannot be political, for their enclosure in realism precludes reflection on these forms (as in Marin Karmitz's Coup pour coup, 1971).

To address the Cahiers position, or positions, O'Shaughnessy begins his critical account with Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, who writes, appropriately enough, for Positif, the old antagonist of Cahiers. In his writing from the 1990s, Jeancolas suggests a return to Andre Bazin's commentaries on realism, and O'Shaughnessy responds to that call, noting that Bazin's writing on Italian neorealism contains aspects that can be found in contemporary French committed cinema, specifically its loose narrative construction, the use of nonprofessional actors, and the absence of an overarching grand recit to connect cause and event, a particularly salient affinity for O'Shaughnessy.

While the book accepts a description of the films as broadly realist, O'Shaughnessy adds a crucial idea from an article by Patricia Osganian: the esthetic of the fragment. As O'Shaughnessy relates it, the fragment refers to "the evacuation of the social so that what is left is the uncushioned conflict between individuals." O'Shaughnessy elaborates this idea throughout the book, recurrently invoking the "central characteristics" of this paradigm shift, "the raw, quasi-mute corporeality that ensues from the individualization of social struggle and the loss of collective voice."

The argument of the book draws perhaps even more crucially on the work of French political thinkers (Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Robert Castel, Etienne Balibar). O'Shaughnessy cogently synthesizes a number of their claims to argue that the once powerful organized left, built through soldering class analysis to collective struggle, has imploded. Privatization and the globalization of capital have defeated that left, leaving workers ma rooned from the mooring of unions, shunted to precarious employment, reduced to elemental struggles to subsist. The collapse of a leftist imaginary has deprived these atomized individuals of a common language: "a Marxist or related viewpoint is no longer available to provide an overarching, totalising vision that can connect local and specific struggles to a broader narrative of emancipation."

Joining these cinematic and political interpretations, the book traces the "shift from an esthetic of the totality to an aesthetic of the fragment." Curiously, although the book concentrates almost exclusively on fiction films, a much-discussed documentary film emblematizes the transition of the paradigm shift, and elicits the longest and most fully realized film commentary in the study. Herve le Roux's Reprise (1995) is organized around a short film from 1968 made in the courtyard of the Wonder battery factory in a Paris working-class suburb after the union leadership had agreed to return to work. Le Roux tracked down many of the workers seen in that film, most of whom take positions coinciding with their identifications with political formations, whether management, Communist, or Maoist.

One woman, however, in the original film, but never located, objects strenuously to the capitulation of labor, animatedly gesticulating as she speaks, and Le Roux repeatedly returns to her image. For O'Shaughnessy, "the corporeality, emotional intensity and melodramatic self-representation which the woman has to call upon when she feels that she is no longer being represented" are the strands that O'Shaughnessy picks out as the expression of "raw, untheorized revolt." O'Shaughnessy finds that this woman's exaggerated gestures figures exactly the kind of untamed excess characteristic of the contemporary resistance no longer armed with the once powerful language of the organized left.

In rich, compelling, and often brilliant detail, O'Shaughnessy charts the conceptual trajectory from the films of the "emergent fragment" to the fully formed esthetic of the fragment. In the emergent fragment, memories of the past organized struggles and their explanatory narrative remain, but they no longer have purchase on the present. The hard to see early films of the Dardenne brothers introduce this category, which also includes many others. Guediguian's films fall into this group, where older characters recall that past, while younger characters are struggling in the present.

Some readers, including this one, might regard Guediguian's films as indulging in a demobilizing nostalgia. O'Shaughnessy's analysis deflects that criticism by placing these films in the trajectory of the fragment. That is, they are part of fictional efforts that bear witness to the dissolution of the old, recognizing that that option is no longer available. The book does not necessarily deny their nostalgia, but rather asks persuasively to see these films of the emergent fragment as transitional, caught between the familiarity of the past and the still exploitative but perplexing contours of the new.

In the esthetic of the fragment proper, signs and hopes of the past have disappeared. The later and more familiar films of the Dardenne brothers serve as exemplary illustrations, among many others. The young protagonists may have inconstant, marginal jobs, at best, but they cannot turn to worker organizations for support or understanding. Instead, they act out violently in interpersonal, often familial, relations. The teenage son of The Promise (1996), fired from his automobile apprenticeship because of the demands of his father's illegal trafficking in immigrant labor, eventually defies his father by helping an African family widowed by the father's negligence. The so-called banlieue films (see special dossier in Cineaste, 33:1, Winter 2007) are set in former bastions of a militant working class outside Paris. Despite the estheticized photography of La Haine, the encounters of its young multicultural protagonists when they leave their home turf for Paris dramatize class tensions, illustrating the exclusion of new immigrant groups from the official promise of universal inclusion in French citoyennite, or citizenship.

Most of the critical apparatus concentrates on the esthetic of the fragment, but O'Shaughnessy adds one important, if more controversial, piece. While he notes that Bazin lamented the Italian filmmakers' penchant for melodrama, O'Shaughnessy sees melodrama as an important complement to realism. Following the theory of melodrama advanced by Peter Brooks, O'Shaughnessy writes that just as core features of melodrama were used by realist writers of the nineteenth century to fill in the absence left by the French Revolution, which overthrew the explanatory regime of the sacred, melodrama can be used today to make the now hidden oppression of capital visible. The violence of exploitation has not ended under today's accelerated globalization, and the excessive expression of melodrama can help to bring that violence to the surface, restoring a "transparency" lost by the defeat of the workers' movement and obscured by the new multinational opacity of capital flows. The insistence on melodrama, as O'Shaughnessy acknowledges in citing Bazin, is normally seen as antithetical to realism. Clearly, O'Shaughnessy wants to analogize the French Revolution's smashing of the old order to the shattering of the traditional left narrative, in both cases leaving the survivors without a replacement world view to navigate the new landscape. Using melodramatic devices such as contrived situations may indeed bring characters into unexpected dramatic confrontation, but these moments would seem to contradict the earlier approbation of episodic plot construction, whose appeal lies in the apparently random construction of the narrative episodes. Nonetheless, O'Shaughnessy's critical intelligence may outstrip the theoretical ambition here, for many of the descriptions of the films do highlight revelatory moments of pantomime, muteness, as well as excess that do indeed foreground eruptions of resistance and revolt.

The book, then, provides a grid to read characteristics of the films as illustrative of persistent, if still incipient class analysis. Unlike most books on film, which devote serially one passage to the consideration of one film, the chapters return polyphonically to many of the same films, applying varied criteria to detect the new signs of revolt. Workers on the shop floor in Human Resources refuse management overtures either mutely or in one case by literally barking, "the workers' loss of a collective voice." The buffeted camera movements following the title character in Rosetta stress the physicality of both suffering and struggle of the young woman, "an isolated and driven social atom moving through space, encountering obstacles and colliding with others." Slaughter of a bourgeois family shatters the calm surface of a superficially consensual world in The Ceremony, "the continuation of class struggle in worlds from which it had seemed banished and in which there remains no language with which to name it."

O'Shaughnessy stresses the element of raw and corporeal resistance to distinguish political cinema from a "social cinema" that only records the predicament of the exploited submitting to the violence, fixing them in passive identities. The task of political criticism is to show those individuals in struggle, even at the most elemental, at times atavistic, levels: "a probing of the real that must be worked upon to bring socio-economic violences, divisions and barriers back into visibility in a way that allows the voice of refusal and alternative values to be heard and make sense (or their silencing to be seen and understood)."

O'Shaughnessy has written a powerful and eloquent polemic for retaining a class analysis of film. Theoretically sophisticated, the book also provides a model of what form that analysis might take, directing us to the signs of resistance which criticism can make politically meaningful.-Jonathan Buchsbaum

The Resurrection of Guy Debord

2009-04-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

Source: http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/7173 (Retrieved April 12th, 2009)

The situationist arch-rebel has finally been recognised as a 'national treasure' in France – but would he have appreciated it?

Guy-Ernest Debord would be spinning in his grave – had he not been cremated following his suicide in 1994. The arch-rebel who prided himself on fully deserving society's "universal hatred" has now officially been recognised as a "national treasure" in his homeland.

The French government has duly stepped in to prevent Yale University from acquiring his personal archives, which contain almost everything he ever produced from the 1950s onwards: films, notes, drafts, unpublished works and corrected proofs, as well as his entire library, typewriter and spectacles. The crowning jewel is, of course, the manuscript of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord's devastating pre-emptive strike on virtual reality. The small wooden table on which his magnum opus was composed is also thrown in.

It's difficult to convey how bizarre it is to hear Christine Albanel – Sarkozy's minister of culture – describing the revolutionary Debord as "one of the last great French intellectuals" of the second half of the 20th century. A love-in between a resurrected Andreas Baader and Angela Merkel would be only marginally more surprising. Then again, intellectuals have been something of a Gallic speciality ever since the Dreyfus Affair. They're accorded the privileged status usually reserved for the likes of Bono on these shores. Jean-Paul Sartre's funeral, in 1980, attracted some 50,000 punters. I doubt whether Noam Chomsky or Tom Paulin will top that.

But however incongruous her position, Madame Albanel is spot-on: no one – not even his sworn ideological enemies – can deny Debord's importance. Even though the young prankster soon turned into a curmudgeonly old soak, his influence is all-pervasive. In fact, it was precisely because he hated the modern world with a passion that he was able to analyse it so presciently. "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation," he observes in the opening pages of The Society of the Spectacle – a statement that's only grown in truth since he made it, back in 1967.

Howls for Sade, his first movie, certainly was not "mere representation". It was the cinematographic equivalent of a meeting between Yves Klein's monochromes and John Cage's 4' 33": the screen remains blank throughout – all-white when there is some dialogue and all-black the rest of the time. During the last 20 minutes, the film plays itself out in total silence and obscurity.

Guy Debord co-founded not one, but two, radical movements: the Lettrist International (1952) and the more famous Situationist International (1957), which popularised concepts such as "dérive" and "détournement". The situationists' hour of glory was undoubtedly the student uprising of May 1968, which they partly shaped, but their influence has kept on growing ever since, from Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid's work with the Sex Pistols to the current crop of British psychogeographers (Iain Sinclair, Will Self, Stewart Home et al) via Factory Records and The Idler's anti-work ethic.

In 1959, Debord and the artist Asger Jorn published Mémoires, which was bound in sandpaper so that it would attack any book placed next to it. For years, this lethal dust jacket served as a perfect symbol of Debord's abrasiveness: he was the ultimate outsider whose ideas could never be assimilated by the mainstream. So what went wrong?

The official recognition of Debord's work tends to dissociate the revolutionary from the writer whose classical prose style has been compared with that of great memorialists such as Saint-Simon. This negates the situationist belief that politics, literature and art must go hand in hand: "The point is not to put poetry at the service of revolution, but to put revolution at the service of poetry". Revolution was supposed to lead to the "supercession of art" by enabling human beings to live poetry and become works of art. From this point of view, Debord belongs to the tradition of dadaists and surrealists such as Jacques Vaché, Arthur Cravan or Boris Poplavsky.

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book," Oscar Wilde famously wrote. "Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." The French have long made this aphorism their own, as exemplified by the reception given to the likes of Rimbaud, Céline, Jean Genet or Dennis Cooper. It seems that the only crime an author can commit on the other side of the Channel is poor writing – although you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Olympic Torch Promo Tour Protested in Waterloo, Ont

2009-04-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

Olympic Torch Promo Tour Protested in Waterloo, Ont

WATERLOO—Friday April 3, AW@L activists and members of the Climate Change Containment Unit (CCCU) descended on Coca-Cola’s promotional event for the 2010 Olympic Torch Relay.

The torch relay is currently scheduled to come through Ontario in December 2009. The 2010 Olympics are occurring on stolen native land and causing dramatic environmental destruction and unconscionable gentrification and criminalization of the poor in the city of Vancouver.

The Coke van, which is travelling across the province, was in Kitchener yesterday and Waterloo today, attempting to spread hype for the Games.

However, today AW@L crashed their party—not once, but twice—sending action teams to both of the van’s scheduled stops.

For the first stop, at a local Sobey’s, AW@L dispatched the CCCU who,
dressed in ‘haz-mat’ suits and armed with large fire-extinguishers, warned the Coca-cola Olympic Torch Relay team that if they were to attempt to light the flame while inside Waterloo or Kitchener, it would be promptly extinguished. “The Olympic torch must be seen as a symbol for the massive scale of the ecological destruction being caused in the building and preparation for the 2010 Games. It is all of our responsibility to refuse to participate in the brazen display of celebration for the environmentally and socially destructive behaviour that the Olympics represent,” said a member of the CCCU.

AW@L activists were also on hand with a large banner that displayed the
no2010 Thunderbird and the message: “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land.”

One of the activists emphasized that the Olympics are an “embodiment
of neoliberal colonialism, and that the absurd overspending on the Olympic security operation is a sign of creeping fascism and militarism in our police forces and the government’s response to land protection and the struggles of marginalized and oppressed populations.”

At the second stop, at a local Galaxy cinema, members of AW@L handed out
flyers and argued with management and police before vacating the premises. AW@L activists have said that the Torch Relay, if it is to pass through Kitchener-Waterloo, will be met with resistance, as it will across the province and the country.

AW@L is a direct action group based out of Kitchener-Waterloo that works
on anti-war, ecological defence, and indigenous solidarity campaigns.

AW@L’s Climate Change Containment Unit has taken up the task of shutting
down some of those corporations that are most guilty of propagating climate change and environmental destruction. AW@L has endorsed the Olympic Resistance Network’s Statement on Solidarity and Unity. AW@L can be found online at peaceculture.org and reached by email at antiwar@peaceculture.org.

--
dan kellar
-------------------------------
Philosophical Environmentalist
Eternally Concerned Citizen
beingthechange.ca
peaceculture.org

Protesters crash Larry Summers talk

2009-04-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

With capitalism dying, what’s left to protest?

2009-04-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

Source: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1115277.html (Retrieved April 9th, 2009)

IT’S TOUGH being an anarchist these days. After all, what’s the point of owning a black balaclava, combat boots and a personal eyewash dispenser if the object of your hatred causes its own downfall?

Why bother travelling from Seattle to Quebec, to Halifax and around the world if the omnipotent forces of capitalism have done themselves in without any help at all from the brotherhood of the black hood? How frustrating to take on the man, if the man just hauls off and knocks himself cold?

What a cruel denial of validation, that so many protests had so little effect. Turns out the revolutionaries could have stayed home, saved the bail money and capitalism would have wrecked itself anyway.

How bad is the global recession? It’s so bad that even anarchists are out of work. That is if they actually worked, which they don’t.

For anarchists, the problem isn’t supply and demand or the vagaries of the market, because there’s not much of a market for their services anyway. It’s just that capitalism is collapsing, so what’s left to protest?

It’s pretty evident that some righteous steam has leaked out of the professional opposition movement. You could see it in the relatively mild melees at the G20 summit in London. The confrontationists did as much damage as they could, but judging from the television coverage, they lacked their usual gusto.

Sure, hooded men attacked the Royal Bank of Scotland and vandalized the lobby. But that seemed futile since the failed bank is pretty much owned by the British people now anyway.

In fact, the protest was so tame that the only fatality was due to natural causes. The bobbies never even got out their tear gas.

Things have changed out there, that’s certain. Some experts are predicting, if not the end of capitalism, certainly the end of the George Bush no-fetters, grab-what-you-can variety of it.

So who’s an anarchist to hate? The Americans will be out of Iraq pretty soon and have soured on foreign military adventures. Here in North America, we’ve never really had class hatred to exploit.

Sure, the black hood gang can still hate the bankers who got away with fortunes as the economy tanked. But lots of people are mad about that. You don’t have to be a radical to despise the greed heads at AIG who collected bonuses after almost bankrupting the U.S. economy.

But maybe the anarchists should thank the uber-materialists for fulfilling a prediction that goes back to Karl Marx. Marx believed that capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Certainly those seeds, if they exist, have been well watered over the past few years. Markets and industry are in crisis, companies are folding, some billionaires have been reduced to mere millionaire status and last week the G-20 ponied up another trillion dollars to bail out the global economy.

And surely the protest crowd takes heart in the fact that the crisis has recharged calls for curbs on international trade. They’ve demanded protected markets for years.

Now it seems that even industry itself is determined to calcify global trade. For evidence, look no further than the car business.

The North American auto industry is so weak from the economic slowdown and its own strategic mistakes that it’s no longer a threat to foreign markets, if it ever was. At the same time, American workers are losing their jobs and their incomes, so they can’t afford to buy foreign imports.

Emerging powers like India and China have used the liberalized global trade system to revolutionize their economies in ways not seen for 60 years. Life has improved for millions. But does the sudden economic introspection of countries like the U.S. and Britain mean that ends, too?

Even in America, where deregulation has reigned as the prevailing financial dogma since the days of Ronald Reagan, there are calls for economic controls. Leading European powers are demanding much stricter supervision of financial markets.

Where are we headed? All we know for sure is that it’s a time of massive change. Maybe things will get better sooner than we think, but they’ll never be the same. In retrospect, that might be a good thing, too.

Dan Leger is director of news content for The Chronicle Herald. The opinions expressed here are his own. ( dleger@herald.ca)

Angry Luddites attack Google Street Car View

2009-04-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/angry-luddites-attack-google-street-view-car-589902 (Retrieved on April 8th, 2009)

A gang of angry Luddites in Ye Olde Middle England have set upon an innocent Google Street View car driver in an attempt to save their lives from ruin.

"Angry villagers formed a human chain to thwart the progress of a Google Street View car that was in the process of taking photographs of their homes," reads a report in The Times.

Police were soon on the scene in the leafy village of Broughton in deepest Buckinghamshire with the "furious villagers" blocking the progress of the Google Street View car.

A burglar's charter

Local man Paul Jacobs, was quickly able to identify this moving threat to civilisation with its 360-degree snooping camera eye and was quick to warn his fellow villagers of the presence of the Google alien in their midst.

He warned the driver, telling The Times: "My immediate reaction was anger; how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent? I ran outside to flag the car down and told the driver he was not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime.

"This is an affluent area. We've already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police."

Thames Valley Police confirmed that one of its squad cars "was sent to Broughton at 10.20am on Wednesday to reports of a dispute between a crowd of people and a Google Street View contractor."

World. Gone. Mad.

Via The Times

By Adam Hartley

Video of police assault on Ian Tomlinson, who died at the London G20 protest

2009-04-08T11:07:00.000-07:00

More footage of G20 protests (embed option has been disabled):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVtMzdpHuG4

France 'condones police violence'

2009-04-01T21:26:00.000-07:00

From BBC News:

The human-rights group, Amnesty International, has accused the French authorities of failing to investigate alleged violence by security forces.

Allegations of beatings, and even unlawful killings, were rarely looked into and those responsible seldom brought to justice, Amnesty said.

In a report, it cited cases of abuse, many involving ethnic minorities and foreign nationals living in France.

D O C U M E N T (a)

2009-03-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

* Call to the First Libertarian Print and Audiovisual Documentary Fair of Caracas. D O C U M E N T (a) November 2009.

The editorial collective of El Libertario announce that the Venezuelan capital will be, during the second half of November 2009, the venue for D O C U M E N T (a) , the First Libertarian Print and Audiovisual Documentary Fair.

With this event, we want to show the public a sample as large and representative as possible of printed and audiovisual materials produced and avaliable today about the anarchist ideal and related subjects, because as in many others places, in Venezuela it is usually difficult to access books, periodical publications or other documents about anarchy, thus making it more difficult to overcome ignorance and misunderstanding regarding this idea and practice.

What we want will only be possible with the participation of as many editorial and production initiatives that generate audiovisual documentation associated with libertarian and related topics (particularly productions in Spanish). This call is primarily directed at such initiatives because we would like to have the greatest number and diversity of materials that have been developed, so it is important to contact you in advance to determine under what conditions it would be possible to show your work. We emphasize that this call to contact us is not only for those who make libertarian material in a relatively big or “commercial” scale, we will also welcome DIY or craft production.

In the coming months, as the required preparations move forward, we will notify you with more precise details about the Fair and its characteristics. For now, we look forward to receiving the first communication from editors and producers of libertarian materials who wish to have a presence at the event. You can contact us in writing (preferably in Spanish) to feriaa.caracas2009@gmail.com

For info in English about us, see the English section in www.nodo50.org/ellibertario.

Swelling chorus of revolutionary voices calling for radical change in Greece

2009-03-27T11:11:00.001-07:00

From the Irish Times:

Civil unrest in Greece is due to a number of factors. Globalisation and the financial crisis are universal. Specific and local to Greece are the need to reform the education system at both secondary and university levels, the power and status of the police force, the paralysis of public administration, and the condition of some of the Athens suburbs, especially Exarchia where the 15-year-old was killed.

The University of Athens has long been a no-go area for police – imagine TCD not only physically ring-fenced in the centre of Dublin, but also a forbidden city for the authorities. Students today resent the fact that, despite their degrees, the job market in Greece offers little opportunity.

The proliferation of terrorist groups seems to mirror the fragmentation of those making up the political spectrum, and this is reflected in commentaries on what is happening in parliament and on the streets.

“Anarchism” doesn’t exactly define what the violent protests are about. Yes, they query the validity of the modern Greek state, but they are also concerned with a system that denies them their own meaning as citizens.

Where the anarchists call for “the death of the system”, social scientists describe what is happening as “the end of political hope”. It isn’t difficult to see the connection, or, indeed, the common ground.

It's not surprising that a mainstream paper such as the Irish Times would attribute social unrest in Greece to "the end of political hope" and call the actions of revolutionaries "terrorism". I thought I would post this story, however, as another chance to consider what opportunities the economic "crisis" might offer revolutionary causes.

Collective Singularity: A Musing On Paralysis

2009-03-18T17:05:00.001-07:00

Source: Retrieved March 18th, 2009 from http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/6874

Collective Singularity: A Musing On Paralysis

HAPHAZARD DEFINITION:

What hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are separated by what unites them.
-Giorgio Agamben

If you are reading this on a screen, you are staring at our point of contact, our collective singularity. Here, we become one. You are an anarchist. I am an anarchist. Or at least I am telling you I am one. Here, ANARCHIST is simply a word. Here, all past meaning is erased, all understanding is imaginary. Anyone can be an anarchist here, just as anyone with a computer can be here.

Is this communication? Was this ever a form of communication? I vaguely remember thinking of it solely as a mode of communication. Now, in 2009, I am seeing something entirely different. Everyone is interfaced through a totalitarian voyeur culture. All can be observed by the eye which is a distraction just as much as it is camera. We observe the lives of others. We see other places. We mesh in this singularity and become one identity, one group, one movement, one cause, one fight, one war, one electronic world. All of our musings and ideas are observed through a screen. Seen on Myspace. Assessed byNorthCom. The countless anarcho-interneters and the unimaginative servants of the Department of Homeland Security all have one thing in common when they become part of the collective singularity: they are staring into a mirror.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of mirror people who attempted to take over the land of the real. The mirror people lost the war against the real and were banished to the mirrors they had come from. But one day, perhaps, the mirror people would launch a new war. And this time, after having studied their enemy for so long, they would win.

What you are reading now is composed of nothing. Borges, before going blind, wrote his nothings on paper. His nothings were treasured not only because of their brilliancy but because books such as his were scarce and treasured. Only small groups found their collective singularity in the books of Borges and Kafka and Joyce. They could carry these books in their pockets. When the collective singularity was entered into, it was face to face, body to body. Conversation and musing took the form of real interactions. Information was spread slowly but steadily. Mass production had not ensured them instant success or mass audiences yet.

Who is Borges? Who is Kafka? Who is Joyce? Perhaps we know who they are, or perhaps their names simply trigger more associations than we can count? Their names are right along side those of Justice, Facebook, Julien Coupat, Tiger Woods, Ipod, Watchmen, Afghanistan, Call, Nike, Sprite, Nokia, MP3, Rachel Ray, Obama, Economic Crisis, 2012.

One of the theories is that a singularity will eat the world in 2012. What proponents of this theory do not understand is that the singularity is already starting to form. You are staring at it right now. You are watching a bright star collapsing under its own weight. You are living in and seeing the burst of energy flooding away from the collapsed star.

You are the singularity. And so am I. We are the black hole. The computer in front of you is the star.

And the collapse is irreversible.

VIRTUAL ILLUSTRATION:

Hey, for you to note--Ugly girls and boys--I put you on my list--And make you clap to this

-Justice

There is a pop duo known as Justice. They are two French men. But they are really no different than you or I. They are part of the same culture that can be seen in Seattle just as it can be in New York City. When they perform, their crowds jump and cheer under a glowing white cross. These revelers could easily be confused with ecstatic fundamentalist Christians. The cross is worshiped, the duo is praised for doing something common and banal. The two men always appear to be smiling.

The duo released a single entitled D.A.N.C.E.. The song is a simple fusing of old, simple pop songs. Countless people have heard this song alongside countless other pop songs. The duo also recorded a track called Stress. Knowing the song would never be played on the radio, a music video was made which was so disturbing it would not be aired on television.

In the video , a group of youths in the Parisian suburbs is shown walking out of a lifeless environment into the heart of Paris. They all wear the same black jackets. On the back of their jackets is a glowing golden cross. They are united in their urge to destroy the smooth-functioning world outside their prisons. The youths proceed to assault women, break kid's guitars, smash tourist's cameras, knock off car mirrors, smash up a white bar and knock out the owner, fight the police, escape, steal a car and then molotov it. All the time the youths are being filmed by a white camera crew, making the video appear to be real.

While driving away in their stolen car, the youths turn on the radio. D.A.N.C.E. is playing over the speakers. One of the youths smashes the radio in disgust and throws it out the window. After molotoving their stolen car, having nothing left to destroy, the youths turn on the camera men. The video ends with the camera on the ground, filming the flames of the burning vehicle.

(None of this has anything to do with anarchism, by the way).

The collective singularity of a gang is itself. It cares little for anything outside of itself. The gang in the video destroys the very thing rendering them into images. Their rage will not allow itself to be diluted by the common singularity the wealthy and privileged and thoughtful (YOU AND I) are mired in.

They will steal your Ipods and cameras and laptops. They will laugh at your hip clothing. When they come for you, they won't give a shit about anarchism. The more you try to be like them, the more pitiful you will look when they find you. Just as the video attempts to illustrate, what is coming will destroy what it wishes to and as it likes. What is coming casts no light. It is the black space after the collapse of the star. It no longer acts as a reflection. The mirror people have escaped their framed confines. The more you try to ask them to reflect your image, the more fervently they will break your cameras, smash your computers and burn your cars. The mirror people have no race, no nationality, no politics. They are not you. And you are not them. You have nothing in common with them aside from their reflection on your screen. No light escapes from a black hole. It replies to no questions.

AN EVENT OF SOME IMPORTANCE

The whole series of nocturnal strikes, anonymous attacks, wordless destruction, had the merit of busting wide open the split between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious weight of this assault which made no demands, and had no message other than a threat which had nothing to do with politics.

-The Coming Insurrection

During the fires of France in 2005, the urban guerrillas who fought the police planned out their attacks. They were familiar with the battlefield and understood the terrain in a manner that the police did not. The fighting could not have been sustained without pre-existing networks that were as personal as they were virtual. The internet and the mobile were utilized, but without the living networks of neighborhoods and friendship and a shared environment, those electronic tools would have been useless. All military forces need to communicate in order to be effective. Communication during the insurrection of 2005 (when it was not breaking down or being disrupted) was the purpose of using a phone or posting locations on the internet.

The same use of networks was recently seen in Greece. Utilizing the real-time communication these networks provided, over a billion dollars of damage was realized in Athens. The insurrection spread like a virus. Sarkozy was correct in fearing contagion. He had already witnessed what happened in France. Just like the other European leaders, he was afraid of what he saw approaching. He and the others know that what is coming demands nothing aside from their heads.

Unlike the Red Brigades of Italy or the Red Army Faction of Germany in the 1970's, there is no future proletarian state that is being fought for. There is no political counterpart to be dealt with, bought off or neutralized. The coming destructive force is a byproduct of the system, an inevitable error in their programming efforts. No party can lead it. When it rears its head, it does not replicate the State structure. Instead, it decentralizes in order to be most effective. Neighborhoods and gangs and crews form and strengthen out of necessity. To do otherwise leads back into the same prison of daily life which you and I are currently inhabiting. Relationships are not mediated by the collective singularity of the internet, they are face to face because there is no other way for them to be. The singularity becomes common and small and centered around Exarchia or the apartment block or the neighborhood. Like the seized Polytechnic, it is a center of gravity for those who are a part of it.

This virus of multiple singularities has been spreading across the planet. Guadeloupe was a tear in the fraying map of the French Empire. The entire northern coast of Europe erupting, with fishermen fighting the police, was just part of the prelude. The small population of Iceland took its first steps, realizing that they could walk, that they could topple governments. All that was missing were steps taken towards self-governance. In Greece, we are seeing that the process of creation is far slower than its destructive counterpart. But it is happening. Soon enough, we will see someone actually succeed in making a government irrelevant. We will see something new, something that will not be a replication of the State. It will not come about without fire. It will not come about without love. It will require everything at our disposal, especially our patience.

The fires of Athens were the bursting forth of the dignified future. Its herald was the darkness and the flames.

AND NOW FOR THE EMPIRE...

We need to see each other, look at each other, talk to each other, listen to each other. We are others, the other. If this world doesn’t have a place for us, then another world must be made. With no other tool than our rage, no other material than our dignity. We still must find each other, know each other.

-Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

There was a boy named Narcissus. He stared at his reflection so long that he fell in love with himself and became a beautiful flower. If are you reading this, you are staring into the water, Narcissus. This singularity we are sharing here, now, is no different than the singularity of McDonald's. Unity from a multitude. One from many. What do you and I have in common? We are both staring a screen in a moment without time. What does Ashland, Oregon have in common with Richmond, Virginia? They both have McDonald's.

At this point, actual anarchists who are 30 and older have been scattered all across the US. Others keep traveling, keep moving and keep teaching. The ones who learned from reality and not from books and the internet cannot transmit their knowledge as fast as the internet. And so now, in 2009, more and more anarchists have nothing in common besides an image, a representation and a scene. People without a community fight for a community that is created as a reflection of what once was real, potent and glowing: the legends of the past.

Most of us lack the base of support needed to achieve our goals. Armed insurgency would be crushed by the government, all known agitators would be imprisoned, the machine would win. This is what we see. There is nothing left to do but wait to die or begin to live. Some people seem to want to rush into their death, to throw their lives away rather than live in this death-culture. Others, however, have seen that the only thing which will ever win is true autonomy, true independence, true singularity. Our country provides us with something we do not want. Rather than stew in their filth, others have decided to provide themselves with what they do want.

Meanwhile, anarchists walk in circles, sticking with the familiar rather than creating something their immediate communities want. Many anarchists can never figure out what to do because, more often than not, they are not part of any community other than the national anarchist subculture. In the absence of any resistance, any healthy community, many anarchists have flocked to the virtual resistance of the internet and the spectacular representation of the international anarchist movement.

Our collective singularity must end. We are becoming lost in it. This collective singularity is massive and vast, but it is weak and spineless. It can allow us to communicate, but it can also reduce us to spectators. Many have not tasted the power of small singularity. Local singularity is potent and unstoppable. There is no need for representation when there is a town or a neighborhood in front of everyone's eyes, a shared place where the news is delivered by a loved ones mouth.

The collective singularity of the internet, of mass production and the mono-culture allow one to take things for granted. Someone else is burning something down, someone else is starting a community center, someone else will give their money over to the project. From this moment on, dear Narcissus, take nothing for granted. You must do everything yourself. You must do everything with those closest to you, especially the ones you do not know.

The world is outside. The world is not here, on this screen. This is basic. As are all of the conclusions being reached by so many all over the planet. There is no God and there is no Devil. There is no War and there is no Peace. There is no Violence and there is no Pacifism. There is no Magic and there is no Science. The only differences left are real ones. They are visible, they are clear and they cannot be ignored. They are evident. What we all see outside is different. Our difference from once another is our strength. Despite living in vastly different environments, our desires lead us all to the same conclusion: in order for us to survive, we must be in charge of our own lives.

Greece shows us that it is possible and that it is a slow process. There are fires, but there is new life. One could not exist without the other. These fires and this new life is what Marcos keeps talking about when he speaks of rage and dignity. The Zapatista's recently presented the Greek insurrectionists with a mural. Chiapas is not Athens. But yet there is unity between the two. Unity that is not imposed by a machine, but a unity that is born and lives forever in ones own heart.

In Exarchia, Athens, Alexandros Grigoropoulos was executed. In Oakland, California, Oscar Grant was executed. In Oakland, people who were just like Oscar Grant disobeyed the preachers telling them to hide away their rage. They lit fires and trashed McDonald's. They were together, united by their dignity and their rage. Underneath the surface, people are understanding their power.

The mirror is cracking, and the reflections are going to destroy that which made them into the Other.

Soon, very soon, the fable of Borges will come true.

The mirror people will have their revenge.

Good luck, everybody.

The Autonomous Astronaut Association of Oakland

2009-03-09T15:03:00.001-07:00

Column From "Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed"

We began by naming our insurmountable enemy and brainstorming methods by which we can defeat it. For the Oakland chapter of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts our enemy is simple: Gravity. Gravity is the force that is, literally, keeping us down. It is the basis of every assumption about what we can and can’t do. Gravity sticks us to the ground, stops us from fl ying, and sticks the entire government apparatus square on top of our heads and backs. As empiricists we recognize that our battle against our pre-conceptions must begin with a brush war against gravity. Under what terms should we accept this conflict?

It is well established by the Law of Universal Gravity (a selfenforcing name if ever there was one) that every two material objects attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This is usually understood at F=GM1M2/R2. Stated in terms of G, G=FR2/M1M2. G was fi rst measured through what is called the Cavendish Balance, which is comprised of two balanced spheres with a vacuum container between. Within the vacuum was a smaller balanced weight that would be disturbed once the equilibrium of the spheres was shifted. The measurement of this disturbance accounts for our measurable evidence for gravity. As our measuring technologies improved our knowledge (that is, what can be described in terms of number of significant digits), the constant force of gravity has grown. As our technology has improved, our internalization of the specific nature of our enemy has improved.

Till now the fight against gravity has been waged by those looking to decrease the coefficient of friction for short-to-medium range travel. Looking not just for another commodity but to make distance itself a product. Flight has commodified space and created the illusion of a victory against gravity. Instead it is the equivalent of a rugby match. One force pushing against another in some sort of scrum. Part of our challenge in our own battle against gravity is not to follow the path of merely joining in this scrum.

As one can imagine, primary literature along this line is difficult to find, and the secondary literature is ideological to the point of absurdity. UFOs, , the Rockefellers, and hour-long orgasms may be connected to the battle against gravity but only, at best, in tenuous ways. Researchers willing to break with the dogma of science-ism are as rare as anarchists willing to break with the dogma of anarchism.

The most fruitful direction for our research appears to follow the clues left by Yevgeny Podkletnov in his never-published “Gravitational shielding properties of composite bulk YBa2Cu3O7-x superconductor below 70K under an electromagnetic fi eld,” and in the hints he has left since then. The point is obvious. Gravity isn’t fixed and there are ways that we can contest it.

We also love the levity of John Searl, who not only claims to have built 50 versions of his fully functioning antigravity device, but also to have fl own around the world—undetected—in at least one of them. In many ways he is a kindred spirit, but mostly in his practice of eschewing authority in his pursuit of trans-conceptual intersections. His arrest for the theft of electricity is similar to our recent arrests for “Unpermitted launching of sky rockets using external guidance and stability.” Experimentation transcends earthly law.

AAA’s strong preference is to get directly involved in the experimental fi eld; we refuse to trust our confl ict with gravity to the struggles of peer-reviewed scientific journals and the pockets of government agencies and multinational corporations. Their priorities continue to be terrestrial. At this time our research isn’t possible due to our own lack of resources, but is a project we plan for the future.

For now we struggle with our participation in what is derogatorily referred to as “amateur rocketry,” which has recently seen a major resurgence. Not since the Space Race of the 1960s has there been more excitement and participation by people-who-are-not-paid-to-care about the human capacity to travel to the stars. This means that obtaining a certain level of material beyond model rockets is easier than it has ever been.

We are still working at the level of small liquid bi-propellant rocket motors using pre-manufactured solid fuel motors, but desire to work in the direction of experimenting with liquid fuels and pushing more mass into the sky. This update on our work is largely a call for more participation in our project along the lines of resources, knowledge, and other empiricists who are interested in autonomous space travel. We have several methods where we hope to continue our shared project: the Oakland AAA blog, personal correspondence, and in the field where the battle ensues.

Liberated from their systems of control, so-called common sense ideas about how to live and think, the spirit of autonomous astronauts will require the grit and determination of a new golden age of speculative empiricists. From that we will gain the ability to live freely and the will to engage in impossible struggles that can achieve successes beyond what has been imagined up till now. A determination to be competent at the skills necessary for the next stage of our struggle; calculus, a steady hand with explosive materials, fleet feet, procurement skills, craftiness, and a sense of humor. Join us!

There will be no ideology in space.
http://anarchymag.org/aaa

CFP: Post-Anarchism: Beyond Ideology

2009-02-24T18:24:00.000-08:00

For those of you who don't know, Immedium Press (the brainchild of Harvard Haarstad and Mark Graham) released a call out some years ago for their collaborative project "Post-anarchism: Beyond Ideology". The project is a little different than the one that I am currently involved in (i.e., The Postanarchism Reader) in that it adopts a Fair Use license policy which eradicates the burdens associated with copyrights. Unfortunately, the project has been on a bit of a hiatus pending the gradual decay of other academic pressures, but I have agreed to take this on as a side-project for the future. If any others are interested in something like this which would, unlike the Reader project, showcase new and original work in the area, let me know.

In the meantime check out their website for the project here: http://www.immediumpress.com/Sub/postanarchism.html

New Book: Contemporary Anarchist Studies

2009-02-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

There's a new anthology from Routledge that looks interesting: Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy. Apparently, it has not been released yet.

From the description:

This interdisciplinary work highlights connections between anarchism and other perspectives such as feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, post-modernism and post-structuralism, animal liberation, and environmental justice. Featuring original articles, this volume brings together a wide variety of anarchist voices whilst stressing anarchism's tradition of dissent. This book is a must buy for the critical teacher, student, and activist interested in the state of the art of anarchism studies.

Welcome

2009-02-20T22:33:00.001-08:00

Post-anarchism anarchy is often defined in relation to poststructuralist and postmodernist political philosophies (specifically, the varieties found in the writings of Todd May, Saul Newman, and Lewis Call). But perhaps it would be more fruitful to extend the post-anarchist analysis to include all those variants of anarchist thought which have interrogated the tradition from the inside (such as, for example, Bob Black and Hakim Bey's 'Type-3 anarchism', Jason McQuinn's 'Post-Left anarchy', Aragorn! and HPWombat's 'nihilist anarchism', etc.

Some of the questions I would like to think about is: How can we begin to think postanarchism anarchy in new, dangerous, ways?, How can we begin to bring post-anarchism (particularly its current fixation with poststructuralist/postmodernist theories) out of the academy and into the broader discussion?

I encourage you to join the discussion, contribute by posting questions, thoughts, blogs, essays, etc, to try to work through some of these ideas.

Email r5jmp@unb.ca if you would like to contribute.