African People's Solidarity Committee writes:

Diamond Industry Reps Scurry to Defend Profits
African People's Solidarity Committee

Earlier this week Martin Rapaport, President and CEO of diamonds.net and the Rapaport Diamond Report, issued a special statement concerning the ethical issues surrounding the diamond industry. This comes just a few days before representatives of the international diamond industry descend upon New York City for the 4th Annual Rapaport International Diamond Conference.

In Rapaport’s letter he admits that, “Over one million artisanal diamond diggers in West Africa are at grave risk in places like Sierra Leone, where 28% of children die before the age of 5 — the highest child mortality rate in the world. Many of the people mining our diamonds are so poor they cannot keep their children alive.” This is a startling confession from one of the most powerful figures of the diamond industry, an industry that previously claimed that they were beneficial to the people of Africa.

In the face of a mass movement and boycott against their industry, the diamond cartels are offering to self-regulate the brutally exploitative industry. They promise to set up non-profits and charities to build schools and create medical care for the diamond workers.

The African People’s Solidarity Committee rejects this public relations ploy. They are calling for nothing less than all of Africa’s resources under the control of the African working class itself. Africa is the richest continent on earth. Africans don’t need charity; they need control over their own land.

On February 5th, human rights activists will demonstrate at the New York City Hilton Hotel during the 4th Annual Rapaport International Diamond Conference. Protest organizer Robert Notowitz of the African People’s Solidarity Committee declares, “We have the responsibility to shut down an industry that ravages the land and labor of Africa to benefit the white world. For white society, the diamond is promoted to represent the ultimate expression of love. For Africa, the diamond trade has its origins in colonialism, with African people forced to labor on their own land under slave-like conditions for pennies a day. All diamonds are blood diamonds!”

Then in the evening of February 5th, a forum will be held at the Church of the Village, with speakers from the Uhuru (African Freedom) Movement, including Diop Olugbala, organizer of the Sean Bell Justice Tribunal, and Penny Hess, author of “Overturning the Culture of Violence”. Physicist Aisha Fields will discuss the Uhuru Movement’s clean water and sustainable electricity projects in Africa. The Church of the Village is located at 201 W. 13th Street in the West Village.

For more information visit www.boycottdiamonds.net

Notes on Paolo Virno in Buenos Aires

Maribel Casas-Cortés + Sebastián Cobarrubias (part of the Notas Rojas Translation Network), Federico Geller

Virno’s visit to Buenos Aires in September 2006, invited by Colectivo Situaciones and Tinta Limon press, brought new perspectives into a public space characterized by the lack of a radical critique to the state. This absence is due in part to the notable recovery, although incomplete, of the institutional legitimacy of the state in Argentina and neighboring countries.

His porteño* [* Translators’ note: porteño = from Buenos Aires] debut was at the School of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Buenos Aires focusing on the general intellect and its political potential as the main topic. Later, he presented his most recent book, Ambivalencia de la multitud (The Ambivalence of the Multitude), at the National Library where Virno followed his own argument elaborated in the chapter of that book: "El llamado 'mal' y la crítica del estado" ("So-called 'Evil' and the Critique of the State"). At the Latin American School of Social Sciences he dissected the encounter between Foucault and Chomsky focusing on the issue of human nature. All three events were well attended.

Three questions from the audience, made at different moments during his presentations, give a rough idea of the context of these events:

1) In light of the fact that nothing remains from the processes that emerged in 2001 in Argentina, the fall of the EZLN and the strengthening of Lopez Obrador in Mexico, what do you think about the critique that Rosa Luxembourg made of Lenin and the Bolsheviks when they abolished the constituent in favor of the soviets? It is clear that a problem of discontinuity and repetition exists in movements: there is no antidote to this fragileness yet. Virno expressed his agreement with Rosa Luxembourg: both constituents and committees are required: “Movements must learn to create norms and to get out of the rhetoric of impotence!”

2) How can we think of the Multitude’s enemy?
The enemy is the Pharaoh: those who recreate the form of the statist “One”. The whisperings of the many in the Exodus. The Superdome in New Orleans. The strength of the many: the intent to recreate the “people” as a technical category opposed to the Multitude.

3) Do you believe in the possibility for alliances between the State and social movements in South America?
Virno answered that he has heard many positive things as well as many negative things about the progressive governments of South America. He wants to know more, but believes that: (i) they definitely represent a global contradiction that is important to take into account and (ii) governments producing liberation is not to be believed, but it is worth asking whether governments can open spaces so that movements can produce liberation, in their spaces of everyday life and in the world of work.

According to Virno, an entirely post-fordist world would be unworkable, but the intellectual faculties of the human animal become the fundamental resource for processes of production, which in and of itself exceeds the time and space of a workshop or factory, in the same way that the general intellect exceed the machine and technological tools, constituting ‘live work’.

The question is: “how this grouping of natural abilities, today presented to us as productive capacities, can turn into institutional forms contrary to the State?”

To respond to this it is necessary to abandon the juvenile contempt for the word “institution”: an activist collective that invents its own norms and is guided by them is also an institution. It’s an issue of animals protecting themselves from danger.

There is an enormous gap between the productive system and the intent to create a political order at the level of that productive process. Our challenge is to translate the diverse forms of the general intellect into spatiality. Without space there is not politics.

In 1932, Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher, presented a challenge about the relations between theories of State and their anthropological base. For Schmitt, the hostility that anarchists have towards the State presupposed the innate goodness of human beings, however the majority of what was understood as political theory supposed that human beings were “bad” and problematic. This then justified the necessity of a “monopoly of political decision-making”.

In the words of Hobbes, the problem is posed as an opposition between the “civil state” and the “state of nature”: the monopoly over political decision-making would constitute the pseudo-environment able to contain the multitude, disregarded by Hobbes as a reccurrence of the state of nature within the civil state.

In the famous disagreement between Chomsky and Foucault in 1971, Chomsky followed the argument of the anarchists, justifying the need to struggle against state hierarchies and capitalism due to their oppression of the collective creativity of our species, this capacity being the result of a supposedly universal grammatical structure that is written into our DNA. Foucault denied discussing the existence of a human nature, considering the concept as a mere epistemological indicator of the changing relations between disciplines at distinct moments of history. According to Virno, “that night, the two teachers showed the worst of themselves”.

Virno doesn’t want to escape from an investigation into human nature. But his vision of the bio-anthropological redundancies does not establish an inclination of our species towards “good” or “bad”, rather it posits our ambivalence: it is the image of a “neoténico” animal confronted with the absence of a defined environment, which would imply a constant “openness towards the world”, a source of potential and dangerous instability. Virno suggest that this instability – denominated “bad/evil”— could be the pedestal for a “radical hostility toward the State”.

Differing from Chomsky, Virno considers the role of language to be that of opening possibilities for ambivalence. He takes the work of the Italian neurobiologist Gallese on mirror neurons into consideration. These neurons, hypothetically, constitute the physiological base of recognition between like beings. Virno suggests that the capacity for negation allows one to hide the natural recognition amongst similar being as well as recover it. In this schema, our unchanging aspects are transformed from top to bottom by our verbal capacity.

His proposal – recognizing the escape from a state of nature as impossible— is to take up the concept of the Katechon, which appears in St. Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians: the force that can contain “evil”, confronting but not eliminating it.

His question: what non-state and anti-monopolist institutions, what normative systems, can confront, without proposing annulment, the return to infinitude, compulsory repetition, the state of nature which has become a civil state through the process of a globalizing world? He suggests retaking Wittgenstein’s carta magna: “A proposition could be treated, one time, as a proposition to revise, and another time as a rule for revisions.” Our contempt should be directed towards the pre-ordained obedience to norms, not towards the existence of norms that may be considered, in a dynamic way, as de jure and de facto questions.

Virno, concludes that it is of vital political importance to construct a cautious bridge over the chasm that separates the sciences of matter from the sciences of spirit. This is an invitation to build our own natural history, in a way that can take into account both the evolutionary narratives that explain the invariable aspects of the human species, as well as the historical narrative of the contingencies in which those invariable aspects express themselves.

Anonymous Comrade writes

Eyal Weizman


The Art of War
Frieze, Issue 99

The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools.

The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’.1 During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

Juan Santos writes:

"Mel Gibson's 'Apocalypto':

The Cinematic Logic of Genocide"

Juan Santos

Mel Gibson’s "Apocalypto" is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike "Braveheart" and "The Passion of the Christ", "Apocalypto" is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it's “pure, amoral sensationalism.”

Despite its extreme brutality "Apocalypto" isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.

The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of "Apocalypse Now!", there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.

Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," is how Gibson puts it. In other words the Conquest was not genocide but a moral comeuppance; the civilization didn’t fall, in the final analysis, from climate change or inadvertent soil depletion or even war – it was conquered in god’s wrath against the forces of evil. And Gibson’s made sure you see the ancient Maya as a force of profound evil.